New drugs for deadly diseases
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The top five infectious diseases kill more than 11.6 million people globally each year.
Meanwhile, the number of new drugs in development is low and the pace of drug development to treat these diseases is alarmingly slow.
For example, no new antibiotics were approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 2008 and no new classes of drugs for malaria – which kills a child every 30 seconds – have been introduced since the 1960s.
UNMC’s planned Center for Drug Discovery will better enable some of the world’s top scientists in diseases such as malaria and HIV/AIDs to collaborate and develop new drugs to treat patients with these conditions.
“The time is right for this center at UNMC as we are fortunate to have some of the finest scientists in the world on campus,” said Courtney Fletcher, Pharm.D., dean of the College of Pharmacy. “The need to confront these emerging infectious disease threats is now and this center will allow us to act.”
The center will facilitate the discovery, development and delivery of drugs to treat new, emerging and neglected infectious diseases.
It also will give UNMC students a unique chance to learn and work in a cutting-edge setting to confront some of the world’s deadliest infectious diseases.
“The center will allow our scientists to work in an interdisciplinary matter to tackle these diseases and give our students the advantage of state-of-the art education, working on real-world problems to improve human health,” Dr. Fletcher said.
