World TB Day 2011

Today marks World TB Day 2011.

This year the Financial Times has produced a special FT health supplement called “Combating Tuberculosis”. This highlights everything from needing more money for the clinical trials, the poor distribution of drugs for multidrug resistant TB and also recent discoveries in the biology of TB. An editorial online also suggests “Tackling TB will be expensive. The price of not doing more will be greater.”

At CDD we continue to support the many global groups working on TB drug discovery who use our technology to securely store and share their data. At the same time we are committed to making more of the published data on molecules, their targets in TB and their biological activity accessible in CDD. Through our many collaborations with leading researchers we continue to learn:

1. What makes a compound active in vitro versus TB.
2. How we might mimic essential metabolites.
3. how we could use computational methods more effectively to repurpose drugs for neglected disease and make discovery more efficient.

We will soon be announcing a unique relationship that could further enhance the public data on TB in CDD – so watch this space. In the meantime we will do our bit to help raise awareness of this continuing devastating disease and fight it with science, we still have a lot to learn from Robert Koch.

“If my efforts have led to greater success than usual, this is due, I believe, to the fact that during my wanderings in the field of medicine, I have strayed onto paths where the gold was still lying by the wayside. It takes a little luck to be able to distinguish gold from dross, but that is all.”— Robert Koch, Journal of Outdoor Life (1908), 5, 164-9.

Sean Ekins
Collaborations Director, CDD