The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation recently awarded $68.2 million in grants to develop cures for three deadly but neglected parasitic diseases, scourges that kill or disable millions each year in the developing world.
The grants include a $32 million infusion to the Infectious Disease Research Institute of Seattle to fund trials of a therapeutic vaccine to treat leishmaniasis, a parasite transmitted by sand flies.
A grant of $21.3 million will go to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, which is heading a consortium to develop better, cheaper drugs to treat late stages of both leishmaniasis and trypanosomiasis. Also known as sleeping sickness, trypanosomiasis is transmitted by the tsetse fly, killing some 300,000 people a year and rendering vast regions of Africa uninhabitable to people and cattle.
And $13.8 million to the Sabin Vaccine Institute of Washington, D.C., for its continuing work to develop a vaccine to prevent hookworm, a soil-dwelling worm that invades the skin or digestive tract of an estimated 600 million people in the developing world, causing chronic malnutrition and anemia.
[Excerpt of an article by Marilyn Chase, The Wall Street Journal]
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