There is no question that those hardest hit by the erosion of global health solidarity are the communities DNDi exists to serve.

The principles we were built to defend – scientific excellence, open collaboration, sharing knowledge freely, and treating equity as a guiding principle in medical innovation – are facing stronger headwinds than we have known.

Developing the medicines that neglected communities have gone without for generations is a lifeline, not a luxury that can wait for easier times or be traded away for short-term savings.

Standing with our partners, we are proud to look back on a year of proof that perseverance is still delivering against the neglect.

Chief among our shared victories is acoziborole: a revolutionary single-dose oral cure for sleeping sickness. Developed with Sanofi, the national sleeping sickness control programmes of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and Guinea, and other long-term partners, it received a positive opinion from the European Medicines Agency in early 2026 and was registered in the DRC within weeks. Just 20 years ago, the only treatment for advanced sleeping sickness was a dreaded arsenic derivative that killed one in every twenty who received it. Health workers now have a simple tool to cure their patients without fear and bring an end to a disease that has haunted Africa for decades.

We have travelled a remarkable journey with our partners to make safer, simpler sleeping sickness treatments and the prospect of disease elimination a reality. It was a privilege to be named a laureate of Japan’s Hideyo Noguchi Africa Prize, which honoured our successful persistence.

Our long-term focus on developing all-new treatments for leishmaniasis is also bearing fruit. LXE408 – a first-of-its-kind oral candidate in development with Novartis and partners – completed Phase II trials in India and Ethiopia, and early results indicate an encouraging efficacy and safety profile. If its development succeeds, it could be administered as a short course of tablets dispensed at clinics close to home, sparing patients the weeks of hospitalization and toxic injections they have long had to endure. It could also lend fresh force to efforts to eliminate the disease – particularly in Eastern Africa, which now carries more than 70% of the global burden.

We are also advancing in our efforts to be ready for dangers still to come. Among other strides in our pandemic preparedness drug discovery programme, ASAP-0017445 was nominated as a DNDi pre-clinical candidate after showing promising activity against SARS-CoV-2, MERS, and related coronaviruses. It is the first candidate to emerge from COVID Moonshot, a crowdsourced, open science, AI-guided discovery effort that brought together volunteer chemists worldwide who worked to share their science at the height of the last pandemic.

Despite its unprecedented growing spread in recent years, fuelled by the climate crisis, there remains no specific treatment for dengue. We were grateful to welcome fresh backing from the European Commission through AFD, the French Development Agency, to support our work to deliver the dengue treatments the world so badly needs. It enables groundbreaking clinical trials led by the Dengue Alliance, a partnership of leading research institutes in Latin America and South and South-East Asia joining forces to address dengue’s growing threat – a true model of global health collaboration that we have worked to foster from our very beginnings.

Beneath this progress lies a determined resolve to honour our commitments to patients and put our experience at the service of a global health system being reinvented.

The architecture of cooperation, financing, and delivery is changing quickly, but open scientific collaboration and needs-driven medical innovation must remain at the core. Reform that targets efficiency and impact must deliver the tools to unburden overstretched health systems and reach communities that today’s tools cannot.

We stand firm in our commitment to neglected patients – and in our conviction that innovation is hope for families and communities around the world held back by neglected diseases.

To our partners, colleagues, and supporters, and to the patients who have always been our compass: thank you for standing with us.