Dear partners, colleagues, and friends,
This year has tested us in profound ways. While the headwinds for science and global health can be extremely disheartening, I am closing out the year with gratitude and pride in the tremendous progress our teams and partners are making against challenging new odds.
You have made 2025 a year of resilience, resolve, and unwavering action for neglected patients.
At the start of the year, we reached a historic milestone in the fight against sleeping sickness: the first all-oral treatment for the rare but deadly rhodesiense form of the disease became available in Ethiopia, Malawi, and Zimbabwe, replacing toxic, hospital-based regimens. Guinea and Kenya became the ninth and tenth countries to succeed in eliminating sleeping sickness as a public health problem, and our teams and partners also closed in on the drug development finishing line for acoziborole. We hope the new safe and simple single-dose cure will be a game changer in Africa’s drive toward sustainable sleeping sickness elimination.
In South Asia, we celebrated twenty years of the Regional Kala-azar Elimination Initiative, which has seen countries achieve dramatic reductions in visceral leishmaniasis (VL). Efforts to put evidence into action against the deadly parasitic infection also gained momentum in Eastern Africa with the launch of a new memorandum of understanding for VL elimination in the region. As we near completion of Phase II trials of LXE408, our promising first-in-class oral VL treatment candidate, and advance other promising candidates in our portfolio, our teams remain laser focused on delivering the medical innovations still needed to achieve and sustain VL elimination.
With activity against SARS-CoV-2, MERS-CoV, and other viruses of the same family, we celebrated the nomination of ASAP-0017445 as a DNDi pre-clinical drug candidate. The new compound is the first coronavirus antiviral developed through crowdsourcing and open science – and the first with its origins in artificial intelligence. We examined this and other successful DNDi collaborations in our new policy report, Open Science in a Closed World – one of the first comprehensive looks at how openness can be operationalized in real-world R&D collaborations to ensure affordable access to life-saving medical innovations.
On the global stage, the conclusion of negotiations on the WHO Pandemic Agreement signalled countries’ commitment to a fairer architecture for preparedness and response, including provisions we pushed for strongly to ensure public investments guarantee equitable and timely access to health tools.
From being honoured with Japan’s Hideyo Noguchi Africa Prize to welcoming new European Union investment in developing urgently needed treatments for dengue, our partnerships have been recognized for their life-saving impact and vital potential to continue delivering against neglect.
I hope you enjoy learning more about these and other advances at DNDi in our Year in Review.
Thank you for standing with us in these challenging times, and thank you for your solidarity in science for the most neglected. On behalf of everyone at DNDi, I wish you a happy and healthy new year.
Dr Luis Pizarro
Executive Director, DNDi
