This Group Helps Fight Devastating Diseases The World Ignores

This article is part HuffPost’s Project Zero campaign, a yearlong series on neglected tropical diseases and efforts to eliminate them. This group is developing drugs to treat diseases that are too often left behind. The Drugs For Neglected Diseases Initiative (DNDi) develops treatments for neglected tropical diseases ― a group of at least 18 diseases, such as elephantiasis and river blindness, which affect more than 1 billion people but are largely unknown and under-resourced since they mainly impact poor communities.  “They’re diseases that nobody has ever heard of, that are difficult to pronounce, that do not make headlines,” DNDi’s Rachel Cohen says in the video above. “Because they affect poor, marginalized and vulnerable people all over the world.”  While some experts criticize pharmaceutical companies for not developing drugs to fight these diseases, others say more effort is needed from governments to prioritize research and development in health policies, reports The Guardian. “These diseases affect very poor patients who do not have the economic power to buy the treatment,” DNDi’s Dr. Natalie Strub-Wourgaft says in the video. “Therefore there is no return on investment from the pharmaceutical industry.”  DNDi uses a non-traditional, nonprofit model to develop new treatments for neglected diseases: By partnering with a variety of research institutes,...
Source: Science - The Huffington Post - Category: Science Source Type: news