2023 Highlights
Preparing for future pandemics
Driving research and advocacy for the benefit of all
The World Health Organization (WHO) declared an end to the emergency phase of the COVID-19 pandemic in May 2023. And although the virus continues to circulate – along with painful memories of the devastation and disruption the pandemic delivered at its peak – attention has turned to preparing for the next crisis.
When the next pandemic hits, will the world have the testing, treatment, and vaccine solutions it needs to respond? Will the poorest and most vulnerable communities have access, too? We’re working with our partners to help make sure that the answer to both questions is yes.
Leveraging our two decades of experience driving not-for-profit R&D for the most neglected, our teams and partners continued work in 2023 to help operationalize equity in pandemic preparedness and response – both through efforts to discover new, ‘fit-for-future’ drugs against pandemic-prone viruses and by advocating for the shared commitments needed to ensure all people have access to the life-saving medical tools they need.
Fit-for-future drug discovery
In the complex field of drug discovery for diseases of pandemic potential, our teams and partners are united by a common goal: placing on humanity’s shelf a collection of potential broad-spectrum antiviral drugs that will be ready for scale-up manufacturing and clinical evaluation when the next pandemic strikes, and which could be developed quickly into affordable, globally accessible treatments. We worked with a wide range of research partners around the globe in 2023, utilizing AI, open science, and cutting-edge discovery tools to advance our efforts.
Together with Diamond Lightsource, Stanford University, PostEra, MedChemica, and the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, DNDi is a leading partner of the AViDD ASAP Consortium. Since 2022, international scientists in the Consortium have applied X-ray fragment screening supported by machine learning to identify new inhibitors of key viral proteins, including SARS, MERS, dengue, and Zika. Several promising compounds have already advanced to the lead optimization phase. The ASAP consortium exhaustively shares protocols, results, and structure information, as well as regular updates on the project progress, via an extensive, free-to-access web platform. Its extraordinary commitment to data sharing earned it the 2023 DataWorks! Prize from the US National Institutes of Health and Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology.
With partners in the COVID Moonshot, the ASAP project’s predecessor, we continued work in 2023 to optimize an antiviral discovered by Moonshot – DNDi-6510 – that has shown excellent safety and in vivo efficacy in pre-clinical models. The success and unique features of the partnership are also attracting attention: with over 27,000 downloads, our article published in Science Magazine in November detailed the powerful roles that open science and crowdsourcing at a massive scale played in identifying DNDI-6510 – and how our approach could be emulated in future pandemics to rapidly deliver affordable, ‘straight-to-generic’ drugs.
In India, our teams continued work on broad-spectrum antivirals with SVKM’s NMIMS and the Indian Institute of Technology, which led to identifying novel analogue compounds with improved microsomal clearance. We also enhanced our understanding of antiviral structure activity relationships for host-targeting antivirals, comprised of new derivatives showing potent antiviral activity against a broad range of viruses, including SARS-CoV-2, influenza, and dengue.
Our collaboration with the Nucleoside Booster – a network of German high-security laboratories and university research centres led by Heidelberg University Hospital – also yielded significant results. After screening 128 compounds against some of the most dangerous pathogens known to exist, partners have identified four nucleosides with broad-spectrum antiviral activity and 19 with narrow-spectrum activities.
Getting it right next time
At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, world leaders projected confidence that the global response would be an exercise in solidarity – that we could overcome national self-interest and make our shared protection from the virus our prerogative. While international collaboration saw the development of life-saving tests, treatments, and vaccines at record speed, the glimmers of unity faded quickly thereafter. People in lower-income countries were unable to secure access to the medical tools they needed, especially vaccines, resulting in preventable suffering and death from COVID-19 and countless other illnesses for which access to medical services and essential tools was widely curtailed.
The barriers to access and affordability that surfaced for COVID-19 health tools were acute examples of the chronic failures DNDi and our partners have worked to overcome for more than two decades.
Researchers conduct laboratory assessments at the Kenyatta University Teaching and Referral Hospital in Nairobi, Kenya – one of 17 African research sites that participated in DNDi’s COVID-19 clinical trial.
In 2023, we continued speaking out for change that we know from our experience can help shift the status quo. Our peer-reviewed paper ‘Striking fair deals for equitable access to medicines’ detailed examples of the gold-standard access clauses DNDi builds into our collaboration and licensing agreements with public and private partners. They enable us to ensure equitable and affordable access to the treatments we develop and can serve as a model that other stakeholders, including public and philanthropic R&D funders, can replicate to do the same.
We continued sharing our experience and well-tested strategies like these with decision-makers throughout 2023 – with a primary focus on the WHO pandemic agreement under negotiation among WHO Member States since 2022. Had more public funders put explicit access provisions in place in the early days of the pandemic, people in low- and middle-income countries would have had far greater access to the vaccines they needed – far faster.
As a public return on their public investments, governments have the power and leverage to achieve greater equity in access to life-saving medical tools. Although WHO Member States were unable to finalize negotiations by June 2024 as initially targeted, we are as certain as ever that the world needs a robust pandemic agreement. DNDi will continue to advocate for its successful completion – and for the inclusion of binding obligations that ensure fairness and equity for all people.
Photo credits: Yaw Afrim Gyebi-DNDi, Lameck Ododo-DNDi
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