Dear Colleagues,
Greetings from Bamako, Mali!
We are here to take part in the Global Ministerial Forum on Research for Health, a quadrillenial event to raise support for health research in and for developing countries. The attendees are largely biomedical and anthropological researchers, donors, international organizations (with overwhelming representation from several of the sponsor organizations) and journal editors (a sometimes soporific mix!)
The organizers claim there are more than 800 people here – which may be true – but many of them must have been enjoying the sights of Bamako yesterday afternoon when Prime Minister M. Modibo Sidebé came by the Forum to express support for the NIH-supported Malaria Research and Training Center here in Mali. Conference staff scurried around to fill the auditorium with attendees, almost scuttling our scheduled drug resistance session.
The session did go on, starting about 30 minutes late, as has been the norm here. Three of us (Susan Foster, Martha Gyansa-Lutterodt and Rachel Nugent) gave a presentation on “Drug Resistance as a Global Health Policy Priority,” with emphasis on Africa. We enjoyed a very engaged audience and had such interest during the Q&A period that we almost missed the bus to the National Museum for the evening’s dinner!
Our primary reason for being here is to raise awareness about drug resistance at the Forum itself (that was yesterday’s session) and to seek feedback on the Working Group’s preliminary recommendations via two pre-consultation sessions directly following the Forum tomorrow. One of these pre-consultation sessions is by invitation only, while the other is an open session.
Discussions of our preliminary recommendations continue the informal consultations that we began with the TB UNION meeting in Paris last month. The purpose is to explore with experts the DRWG’s potential policy recommendations to reduce the global spread of drug resistance. We will seek participant input to help make these action items as feasible and implementable as possible.
At the Forum, we gathered supportive evidence for our recommendations, in particular from two poster presentations:
- Some came from Duke’s University’s program on Global Health and Technology Access, headed by Anthony So. In a poster, So and student Chris Manz, argue for more targeted financial incentives for companies most likely to engage in the development of new classes of antibiotics. Their preliminary results show that of 303 compounds in development, very few represent new classes of drugs that might potentially overcome current patterns of resistance.
- The other poster, from Robert Campbell at the Marine Biological Lab in the USA, supports the DRWG’s possible recommendation for a drug compound library. Scientists found that over 25% of known drug targets have similar protein counterparts in pathogen genomes. This means that a large proportion of industry drug discovery programs have already identified compounds of potential relevance for global infectious diseases, but that potential has not been fully exploited.
The DRWG will be hosting its final meeting in early December at which a set of draft recommendations will be agreed upon. We will then post and circulate the actual consultation report far and wide over the next couple of months, including to the e-newsletter readers. We warmly welcome your input!
Best wishes from Bamako,
Susan Foster, Martha Gyansa-Lutterodt, Rachel Nugent and Alix Beith