UNC-Chapel Hill receives $21.3 million Gates grant

UNC-Chapel Hill has received $21.3 million from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to create drugs to treat African sleeping sickness and a parasitic disease, which infect hundreds of thousands of people in the developing world.

The grant will go to an international consortium led by Dr. Richard Tidwell, a professor at UNC-CH's medical and pharmacy schools. Researchers will team up to develop cheap, effective drugs for African sleeping sickness, spread through tsetse fly bites, and visceral leishmaniasis, a parasitic disease spread by the bites of sand flies. Both diseases can be fatal.

Regina Rabinovich, president of the Gates Foundation's Infectious Disease Program, said in a news release: "We hope that their work will inspire other researchers to focus greater attention on these and other overlooked diseases that continue to afflict millions of people in the world's poorest countries."

UNC has received two previous Gates grants for research on neglected diseases, one in May 2006 for $22.6 million and another in December 2000 for $15.1 million.

The researchers are conducting a clinical trial of a drug for treating early stage African sleeping sickness. If approved, it would be the first new drug in more than 50 years.

The World Health Organization estimates more than 300,000 people are infected with African sleeping sickness, and more than 60 million people in African countries are at risk. It spreads from human to human by fly bites and causes fever, impairment of the brain and nervous system and, if not treated, death.

An estimated 12 million people in 88 countries have leishmaniasis, caused by a parasite. Sudan and India have been hard hit by the disease, which causes lesions, disfigurement and death when it invades organs.