Cape Town hosts confab for new TB drug alliance
Rockefeller’s Pablos-Mendez says time is right’
With the conclusion of this month’s kick-off event in Cape Town, South Africa, the new global alliance for new TB drugs is now more than just a gleam in the eyes of its co-sponsors. But predictions about what the new brainchild of the Rockefeller Foundation will look like, or how it will behave, are still premature and will have to wait for subsequent get-togethers later in the year.
Sibling public-private partnerships aimed at drug development for other "orphan" diseases, including AIDS and malaria, will serve as useful examples of what the TB partnership might look like, says Ariel Pablos-Mendez, MD, MPH, scientific adviser to the New York City-based foundation, but not as precise models. "Each of these partnerships is unique," he says, "and there are lessons to be drawn from them all, but each one is its own constellation."
What’s still lacking in details is more than made up for in enthusiasm, adds Pablos-Mendez.
Public and private interests convene
Although the participants at the Cape Town conference may not constitute the main stakeholders in the new alliance, their numbers (as well as their mailing addresses) suggest strong interest in the new project. More than 150 experts and leaders from private industry (among the 19 confirmed guests from this category were reps from Glaxo-Wellcome, Eli Lilly, Immtech, Pfizer, and the International Foundation of Pharmaceu tical Manufacturers Association) and from academia, government organizations, and donor agencies were scheduled to convene at Cape Town Feb. 6-8.
Co-sponsors of the Cape Town meeting, along with the Rockefeller Foundation (which has spearheaded the drive to form the new alliance) included the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation; the Wellcome Trust; The National Institutes of Health; the United Kingdom’s Department for International Development; and Stop TB, a partnership of governmental, nongovernmental, and financial institutions based at the World Health Organization.
"The time is right," adds Pablos-Mendez. "We have a lot of people who are interested, and I think there is a good chance we’ll have enough support to be successful."
Others at the Foundation concur. "There’s a strong buy-in into the need for such an alliance," says a Rockefeller Foundation spokesman who asked to remain anonymous. "My guess is that there are a number of factors serving as motivations, including the facts that TB is still widely prevalent, that [the foundation] has a new strategy of focusing on orphan diseases, and, finally, that there are a lot of big new foundations keen to discuss these new strategies and this longstanding need."
According to the Cape Town meeting agenda, the new alliance will aim to develop treatments for TB that will both shorten and simplify treatment for the disease. The specific example cited in the agenda was to find drugs that will work their cure in just three months’ time, instead of the current minimum requirement of six months.
Topics on the agenda at Cape Town were to have included the following:
• the current global TB burden, the limits of current control efforts, and the potential impact of more efficient patient treatment;
• new sciences available for TB drug development, with a look at state-of-the-art research and the promise it holds for new TB drugs;
• a review of burgeoning new biotechnologies;
• a look at TB drug development now under way;
• an assessment of industry perspectives on TB drug development;
• a review of other public/private partnerships for orphan diseases.
Closing discussions at the meeting explored the following topics:
• estimating the costs of new TB drug development;
• ways to accelerate drug development;
• a look at what stakeholders need to do to get the process moving more quickly;
• the drafting of a "blueprint."
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