Informatics For Neglected Diseases Collaborations

Tropical infectious diseases affect millions of individuals, predominantly in the developing world. The low financial viability for the sale of new pharmaceutical products in these poor countries does not offer an incentive to enable the high and risk-associated investments in R&D required for the discovery of new treatments for these diseases. Consequently, while these 'neglected diseases' affect many individuals, the research effort has been minimal for the past several decades. Drugs currently used to treat these diseases are of limited availability and efficacy, are costly, and in many cases are based on old molecules, some of which have severe toxic effects. Furthermore, resistance to these drugs has emerged in several of these neglected diseases. For the purposes of this review, the diseases considered as neglected are those diseases listed by the WHO (eg, African sleeping sickness, visceral leishmaniasis, Chagas disease and schistosomiasis), in addition to malaria and tuberculosis. R&D efforts for these diseases are managed by virtual organizations, and thus information management represents a key challenge.