As a young chemist, he worked on malaria treatments at Rhone-Poulenc. After the French drug maker followed the lead of other pharmaceutical companies and dropped the research, Ribeill remained involved as a World Health Organization consultant on tropical diseases such as malaria, sleeping sickness and Chagas.

Now Ribeill, CEO of Durham drug chemistry company Scynexis, found a way to combine his passion with his business.

Last month, he worked out a deal with the Drugs for Neglected Diseases Initiative. The group is paying Scynexis $17 million over five years to help find safer medicines to treat sleeping sickness, also known as human African trypanosomiasis.

Creating a new medicine would bolster Scynexis' reputation, but success would not translate into more money. The mother lode of contract drug discovery is payments for experimental drugs that hit certain development milestones, as well as the royalties on sales. In this case, Scynexis can't expect either, because any drug that comes out of the agreement with Drugs for Neglected Diseases will cost very little, if anything.

"It's probably not the most lucrative business we have going, but it fairly compensates us," said Scynexis' executive director of market development, Terry Marquardt.

Twenty of Scynexis 130 employees are assigned to the project, which aims to create chemicals to treat sleeping sickness. Scientists at Boston biotech company Genzyme and Pace University in New York will help, using techniques refined in developing treatments for diseases prevalent in Western countries.

"We use research tools for diseases of the rich and come up with better drugs for the poor," Ribeill said.

Scynexis and chemistry

Founded in 2000 by 24 scientists who worked at Aventis CropScience's headquarters in Research Triangle Park, Scynexis has had unconventional deals in the past.

Scynexis helps pharmaceutical companies with the chemistry involved in creating experimental drugs, and it manufactures small amounts of drugs for testing. It has contracts to come up with promising treatments for two-legged and four-legged patients.

Drug makers in the U.S. and Japan have hired the company to look for antifungal medicines, cancer treatments and drugs to treat metabolic diseases. Scynexis' biggest contract is a deal worth as much as $200 million to find treatments for cats, dogs and horses.

The contracts are expected to generate $30 million in revenue this year, and Scynexis is considering a possible initial public offering in 2008.

Two years ago, with the business humming and turning a profit, Ribeill decided that Scynexis could turn its attention to tropical diseases.

As a Frenchman, he's aware of Europe's colonial past and said neither large drug makers nor Western governments have done much research on tropical diseases since pulling out of those countries. Once he turned his efforts to making a difference, he recruited Bakela Nare, a Zimbabwe-born biologist, from Merck to crank up research of parasites that cause tropical diseases.

Third World misery

The need for the effort is great. The World Health Organization estimates that at least 1 billion people -- about one in six worldwide -- is infected with at least one of the diseases. It estimates that there are currently 300,000 cases of sleeping sickness, most in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Angola, Uganda and the southern Sudan.

Sleeping sickness, which is transmitted by the tsetse fly, wreaks havoc as it invades the organs, immune system and brain. It is fatal if left untreated, but the medicines that treat it are toxic or old. Most require a series of injections, making the treatment difficult under the best of conditions.

The multibillion-dollar pharmaceutical industry has had little interest in researching treatments for sleeping sickness or other such diseases, because they affect people who have little money for medicines.

Foundations and nonprofit organizations have begun to step in in the past few years, Ribeill said.

"The world is becoming a smaller place," he said. "There's been a rising awareness that a healthy population is needed in places like Africa."