DNDi’s open and collaborative approach to R&D – driven by patient needs, not profits – serves as a practical illustration of how alternatives to the prevailing system of commercial R&D can be organized and implemented, and how they can deliver for people in need.

To ensure both innovation and affordable access to new and improved treatments, DNDi’s collaborative R&D model draws on the assets, capacities, and expertise of our partners at all stages of the R&D process and aims to promote the broadest possible sharing of research knowledge and data across the innovation lifecycle.

Open innovation

Pharmaceutical companies have vast, well-curated libraries of novel, proprietary drug-like compounds built up over decades of research into various disease areas. They also have access to state-of-the-art (and often proprietary) algorithms and computational approaches for assessing chemical ‘similarity’ between molecules. These resources are usually closely guarded and not shared externally – certainly not between competitors.

To speed up early-stage research and reduce overall R&D costs, DNDi works to enable research actors to actively collaborate without the restraints of intellectual property, supporting and coordinating a number of open innovation collaborations , including the Open Synthesis Network (OSN), COVID Moonshot, and Mycetoma Open Source project (MycetOS).

Sustainable innovation ecosystems

Partnership is the cornerstone the DNDi model, which integrates capabilities from academia, public research institutions, NGOs and other PDPs, governments, and pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies. Our collaboration with a global network of more than 200 partners has helped to attract additional researchers to neglected fields, enable more and different results, and accelerate the R&D process by reducing duplication and making R&D activities more efficient and less expensive.

DNDi’s experience has also shown that proximity to the needs of affected communities and patients is critical and can only be achieved through building trusting and equal partnerships with local clinicians, scientists, experts, and patient and community/civil society groups in affected countries.

DNDi established and supports five disease-specific clinical research platforms and networks in low- and middle-income countries to:

• leverage and strengthen existing research capacity;
• facilitate needs definition;
• promote scientific exchange; and
• enable access and delivery of new tools

These ‘knowledge hubs’ maximize worldwide collaborations and form an integral part of DNDi’s model.

Sharing knowledge

Contributing to scientific knowledge by sharing data collected through clinical trials – whether positive or negative – plays a critical role in advancing science to improve the lives of neglected patients whose needs are often overlooked in research.

In 2017, DNDi adopted a Policy on Sharing and Secondary Use of Human Subject Research Data and signed on to the WHO Joint Statement on Public Disclosure of Results from Clinical Trials. DNDi has also committed itself to registering all trials in a publicly available register, such as the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) clinicaltrials.gov or the Pan-African Clinical Trials Registry, promptly reporting results within 12 months after completion of trials, and publishing findings in open access journals.

DNDi also partners with the Infectious Diseases Data Observatory (IDDO) to bring together the global visceral leishmaniasis and Chagas disease research communities to assemble clinical, laboratory and epidemiological data. The collaboration plays a critical role in pooling and standardizing data generated through trials to improve understanding of clinical outcomes and guide the design of future research.