Daiichi Sankyo has entered into a new joint research agreement with Medicines for Malaria Venture (MMV), a Geneva, Switzerland-based product development partnership for antimalarial drug research and development, for a lead optimization project to develop a new antimalarial drug. This project is funded through the Global Health Innovative Technology Fund’s product development platform and will receive approximately JPY 180 million ($1.74 million) over two years.

In June 2013, Daiichi Sankyo and MMV launched a high-throughput screening (HTS) project of a 50,000-compound library from Daiichi Sankyo to discover antimalarial hit compounds. Building on the identification of three hit series during the HTS project, a hit-to-lead project was launched in March 2015. The collaborative research will now proceed to the next stage as the lead optimization project beginning in October 2016, with the goal being to produce a clinical candidate with suitable antimalarial “drug-like” properties.

Source: Daiichi Sankyo