Doing Our Part to Stop Malaria

“If you think you are too small to be effective, you have never been in bed with a mosquito.”
        -Betty Reese

These powerful words only begin to describe the devastating disease known as Malaria. While all it takes to contract the disease is one bite from an Anopheles mosquito infected with the Plasmodium parasite, a steady stream of powerful drugs is necessary to cure it.  While those of us fortunate enough to reside in the western world need not even worry about contracting (let alone curing) this malicious infection, there are millions of people in this world who are not quite so lucky.

Malaria affects more than 300 million people around the world annually.  Of those people, about a million of them will die, the majority of them being children under the age of 5 and pregnant women.  The disease’s presence is known primarily in the equatorial regions, including (but not limited to) Central/South America and Southeast Asia; however it takes its biggest toll in sub-Saharan Africa, where more than 85% percent of malaria-induced deaths occur.  In these places, where the need for treatment is greatest, afflicted persons suffer the most from the lack of such treatment.  The simplest and cheapest of medicines, a drug called chloroquine, is showing an alarming decrease in effectiveness as the disease has gained resistance to this cure.  More advanced, widespread treatments containing a compound known as arteminisin can cost between 10 and 40 times that of chloroquine.  While there are prophylactic drugs available, there is no vaccine on the market.

It’s clear that Malaria must be eradicated. So what’s being done to stop this horrifying disease?

Groups have sprung up around the globe to offer their help.  Some, like the Roll Back Malaria Partnership, deal directly with aiding regions afflicted with the disease (such as providing mosquito nets and basic treatment plans).  Others like the Malaria Foundation International focus on the research side, providing scientists with resources and tools to further the advancement of drugs to combat the infection.

Here at Collaborative Drug Discovery, we offer a technological solution.  Our public-access database includes 5 datasets dedicated to studies of over 15000 compounds used in previous Malaria research.  We work with numerous groups of scientists in this area, providing our platform as a foundation for their research.  You can read about CDD’s contributions to overcoming the resistance to chloroquine in our recent Drug Discovery Today paper in collaboration with Dr. Christopher Lipinski, the McKerrow Group (UCSF), and the Chibale and Smith Groups at the University of Cape Town in South Africa.  These groups privately and securely used CDD, to identify both known drugs and new compounds that almost completely reverse chloroquine resistance!

CDD is one of the many groups that are doing their part in the fight against Malaria.  If everybody does their part, we can stop this disease from continuing to take lives.  World Malaria Day is April 25th, 2009.  Do your part to help stop Malaria.  If you think you are too small to be effective, just think about the mosquito.

For more information on Malaria, please visit the following websites:

• CDC Malaria Facts Page
• Gates Foundation Malaria Page
• WHO/TDR Malaria database
• Medicines for Malaria Ventures
• Drugs for Neglected Diseases Initiative
• Financial Times 2009 Malaria Report

The following is a rare note from the CEO’s desk:

Congratulations CDD – now you are 5!

April  1 of 2009 commemorates the fifth year since CDD was incorporated and spun out of Eli Lilly.  First and foremost, we thank our customers and the CDD community for all of their contributions that have allowed CDD to become an exciting and valuable tool for the drug discovery industry.  It is gratifying to see the market confirm that CDD has addressed researchers’ real needs.  We have new collaborators logging on daily and thousands of researchers consistently visiting CDD.  New customers are constantly signing up – equally from both industry and academia.

With a growing user base, we have many more requests for new capabilities to keep us on target.  Frankly, these include more custom requests than we can ever fulfill, but that is a healthy problem to have. And, paid services are always accommodated on time and within budget.  Recently, we’ve even seen customers routinely select CDD over the established vendors in our industry.  They appreciate the simplicity of using CDD to archive and mine drug discovery data, and our unique-to-the-world, secure, cost-effective collaborative capabilities. 
 
We look forward to sharing more positive developments at our 10 year mark!

Many of you noticed that CDD was unavailable for much of the day on Thursday, April 9th. We wanted to take a moment to explain in more detail the events that caused this outage, and to alert you to a new resource, http://status.collaborativedrug.com.

Those of you who live in the San Francisco bay area might have heard about the incident that occurred early Thursday morning, in which someone cut fiber communication backbone cables in two locations, one near San Jose and the other in San Carlos, CA. The police are pursuing a criminal investigation for this act that disrupted cell or landline phone service in several areas, including disabling ATMs and even 911 service. AT&T has announced a $250,000 reward for information leading to the conviction of those responsible.

The act also completely cut Internet connectivity to the facility where CDD houses its servers. All of the facility’s customers went offline. CDD’s servers were up and running during the entire incident, and would have serviced your requests the same as always had the facility’s Internet connection not been severed. To the facility’s credit, its staff was able to procure another backbone connection early in the afternoon, restoring complete connectivity around 2pm (the repair on the cut lines was completed late Thursday evening). Prior to Thursday, we had been very happy with our experience at the facility and with its staff, with no prior power or network interruptions. CDD is following up with the vendor to understand why their redundant connections to the Internet did not protect them from this failure. Please be assured that we hold our hosting vendors to high standards.

CDD’s uptime has been outstanding for an organization of its size. That said, Thursday’s incident made it clear that one area we could do better is in keeping our customers informed in the event of an extremely rare occurrence like this. As a result, we are in the process of setting up http://status.collaborativedrug.com as a place customers can go for status updates in the event that CDD goes down. This website is hosted at a separate facility in Europe, so any calamity that can be imagined would not cause both CDD’s main servers and http://status.collaborativedrug.com to go offline at the same time. We also plan to include a link to an independent third-party measurement of CDD’s uptime, so that we can prove how outstanding our uptime usually is.