Eisai has signed on to be a member of the Tuberculosis Drug Accelerator (TBDA) partnership, an initiative that aims to speed up the discovery of new treatments for tuberculosis (TB).
As a TBDA member, Eisai will provide targeted sections of its compound libraries for screening against TB and share identified and confirmed hits with other TBDA partners. The company will also cooperate with other partners to facilitate the development of new TB therapies.
The partnership targets the discovery of new TB drugs through early-stage research collaboration. The program was launched in June 2012 with support from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation through an agreement between several pharmaceutical companies—Abbott, AstraZeneca, Bayer, Eli Lilly, GlaxoSmithKline, Merck, and Sanofi—that share data with each other and four research institutions: the Infectious Disease Research Institute, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Texas A&M University, and Weill Cornell Medical College.
The long-term goal of the partnership is to create a new TB drug combination that has the potential to cure patients in one month only, compared to the six months required by existing treatments. The TBDA will contribute to minimizing the length of treatment and decreasing treatment rates.
