BioWorld International Correspondent

LONDON - Dundee University will pay industry-level salaries to attract staff to work on treatments for tropical diseases neglected by commercial companies, as it sets up a new unit to take targets discovered at the university through screening and optimization to be ready for clinical development.

That will mean paying rates 30 percent above academic salaries for eight medicinal chemists it wants to recruit, Mike Ferguson, one of the project leaders, told BioWorld International.

Ferguson and his colleagues have discovered targets in tropical diseases including African sleeping sickness, Chagas' disease and leishmaniasis, but have had no success in persuading industry to take them into discovery.

"The work we are planning to do would normally be carried out by industrial partners, but these are three of the most neglected diseases, where there is no travelers' market, and thus no commercial activity, or plans for any," he said.

Research carried out over several years at Dundee has generated a dozen validated targets. Ferguson said they have not been patented because, "There isn't any money in this, but as we develop molecules to lead optimization, we may well start to patent."

The work will be carried out in a new Centre for Interdisciplinary Research completed recently at a cost of £20 million (US$36 million). The project itself will cost £13 million over the next five years, most of which comes from a grant of £8.1 million from the research charity Wellcome Trust.

"Getting all the pieces together to carry out a serious drug discovery program in an academic environment is virtually unprecedented," Ferguson said. "This initiative aims to marry the best of drug industry practice with academic excellence."

The World Health Organization estimates that there are about 400,000 cases of African sleeping sickness per annum, more than 16 million people have Chagas' disease, which is endemic in central and south America, and more than 12 million have leishmaniasis, a range of diseases found in the tropics and subtropics.

One of the first industry recruits is Julie Frearson, who has joined from BioFocus plc in Cambridge, to set up and oversee the compound screening facilities. In addition to eight medicinal chemists, Ferguson wants to recruit seven other staff with skills in high-throughput screening and target biology to complement the 60 existing academic staff and establish the skills and resources more usually found in a small biotechnology company.