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. 2020 Jan 10;6(1):3-13.
doi: 10.1021/acsinfecdis.9b00371. Epub 2019 Dec 6.

Setting Our Sights on Infectious Diseases

Manu De Rycker  1 , David Horn  1 , Bree Aldridge  2 , Richard K Amewu  3 , Clifton E Barry 3rd  4 , Frederick S Buckner  5 , Sarah Cook  6 , Michael A J Ferguson  1 , Nathalie Gobeau  7 , Jennifer Herrmann  8   9 , Paul Herrling  10 , William Hope  11 , Jennifer Keiser  12   13 , Maria Jose Lafuente-Monasterio  14 , Paul D Leeson  15 , Didier Leroy  7 , Ujjini H Manjunatha  16 , James McCarthy  17 , Timothy J Miles  14 , Valerie Mizrahi  18 , Olena Moshynets  19 , Jacquin Niles  20 , John P Overington  21 , John Pottage  22 , Srinivasa P S Rao  16 , Kevin D Read  1 , Isabela Ribeiro  23 , Lynn L Silver  24 , Jen Southern  25 , Thomas Spangenberg  26 , Shyam Sundar  27 , Caitlin Taylor  18 , Wes Van Voorhis  5 , Nicholas J White  28 , Susan Wyllie  1 , Paul G Wyatt  1 , Ian H Gilbert  1
Affiliations

Setting Our Sights on Infectious Diseases

Manu De Rycker et al. ACS Infect Dis. .

Abstract

In May 2019, the Wellcome Centre for Anti-Infectives Research (WCAIR) at the University of Dundee, UK, held an international conference with the aim of discussing some key questions around discovering new medicines for infectious diseases and a particular focus on diseases affecting Low and Middle Income Countries. There is an urgent need for new drugs to treat most infectious diseases. We were keen to see if there were lessons that we could learn across different disease areas and between the preclinical and clinical phases with the aim of exploring how we can improve and speed up the drug discovery, translational, and clinical development processes. We started with an introductory session on the current situation and then worked backward from clinical development to combination therapy, pharmacokinetic/pharmacodynamic (PK/PD) studies, drug discovery pathways, and new starting points and targets. This Viewpoint aims to capture some of the learnings.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare the following competing financial interest(s): M.J.L.-M. and T.J.M. are employees of GlaxoSmithKline. U.H.M. is an employee of Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research and a shareholder in Novartis. J.P. is an employee of ViiV Healthcare and a shareholder in GlaxoSmithKline. T.S. is an employee of Ares Trading SA, an affiliate of Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany. S.P.S.R. is an employee of Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research. W.V.V. is part owner of ParaTheraTech LLC., a company that is developing bumped-kinase inhibitors for use in animal health.

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