MMV Request For Proposals: Drug Discovery Projects

Medicine for Malaria Venture (MMV) with the mission to reduce the burden of malaria in disease-endemic countries by discovering, developing and delivering new, effective and affordable antimalarial drugs, is seeking proposals in the following areas of the drug discovery process:

1. Control and eradication of malaria:
   • Compounds having activity against blood stages and ideally an inability to select resistant mutants in vitro: novel chemical series with EC₅₀<500nM and novel compounds with, ideally, a predicted human half-life >100h and a predicted oral single human dose <500mg.
   • Compounds having activity against liver stages for use in prophylaxis: novel chemical series with EC₅₀<500nM and novel compounds with, ideally, a predicted human half-life >100h and a predicted oral single human dose <500mg.  Alternatively, an i.m./s.c. dose that can be administered in <<1mL to provide at least 3 months’ protection in humans. 
   • Compounds addressing the key priorities of the malaria eradication agenda: novel families of molecules in the hit-to-lead or lead optimization stages, without G6PD deficiency liabilities.
   • Novel approaches for screening: to identify new phenotypic and/ or target-based hits and to confirm the activity of MMV compounds on all human malaria asexual blood stages.
2. Compounds for Target Identification: MMV also welcomes requests for support to investigate the mechanism of action of compounds:
   • Plasmodium whole cell EC₅₀ <1uM and the chemical structure can be shared
   • At least 10mgs of compound can be provided to the consortium
3. African Proposals: finally, MMV welcomes proposals from endemic region African scientists focused in the following priority areas:
   • Compounds with confirmed activity on any antimalarial life-cycle stage
   • Assay development and screening
   • Computer aided drug discovery

Read more here. 

Proposals deadline March 27, 2020.