20%
1 in 5 DALYS ("Disability adjusted life years") lost annually to disease worldwide are due to diseases with almost no impact in high-income countries.
2,147%
DALY rates are 2,147% higher for infectious diseases among the poorest billion people, compared to high-income regions.
1%
From 1995-2019, only 1% of drugs entering any phase of clinical development targeted a disease on the WHO list of neglected tropical diseases - which affect nearly 2 billion people annually.
> 1 Billion
Between 1999 and 2021, Novartis delivered over one billion treatments of its Malaria drug Artemisinin.
"Neglected diseases", understood broadly as diseases affecting populations in low-income countries, are a leading cause of global mortality, chronic disability, and poverty.
While the pharmaceutical industry does an impressive job of developing drugs which address the health needs of high-income countries, it does an extremely poor job of serving the needs of low-income countries. The degree of the mismatch is staggering...
Building on Prior Work
Neglected disease drug discovery is not scientifically intractable. Rather, these indications have been economically intractable. Quite a lot of research has been done, but abandoned in the absense of a traditional business case. DALYA will catalogue this prior work, to identify useful datasets, promising targets, and early-stage compounds for further development.
Digital Biology
DALYA will agressively leverage a new generation of tools for molecular modeling and biosimulation, to enable what 2024 Nobel Prize winner Demis Hassabis calls "science at digital speed". These methods enable us to {1} screen promising therapeutic targets against up to billions of compounds; {2} design novel therapeutics de novo; and {3} undertake an exhaustive search for opportunities to repurpose existing drugs to our indications of interest.
Advanced Disease Modeling
DALYA will use advanced validation methods like organ-on-chip models to test our candidate therapeutics in human tissue, to improve our clinical trial success rate.
In global health, the burden of disease is often measured using Disability-Adjusted Life Years (DALYs) — a metric that captures both years lost to premature death and years lived with disability. One DALY equals one lost year of healthy life....
World Health Organization (WHO)
Biomedical research: what gets funded where?
Nature
Reboot biomedical R&D in the global public interest
Nature
