Tokyo

Twelve Japanese pharmaceutical companies announced this week that they are joining with the World Health Organization (WHO) and Japan's Ministry of Health and Welfare to launch an initiative to identify potential drugs against malaria.

JPMW — which stands for Japanese Pharma, Ministry of Health and Welfare and WHO — will become part of ‘Roll Back Malaria’, a programme launched last year by WHO to create a global strategy for controlling malaria.

JPMW's activities, to be jointly funded by WHO and Japan's health ministry, will complement other initiatives in the Roll Back Malaria programme. Among these is the New Medicines for Malaria Venture, a public/private sector project supported by funding agencies and drugs companies including Glaxo Wellcome and Hoffman-La Roche (see Nature 395, 417; 1998).

Also active in this field is Multilateral Initiatives on Malaria, a consortium that includes the US National Institutes of Health, the Wellcome Trust, the World Bank and other UN agencies, which aims to develop malaria research in Africa.

The recent increase in collaborative ventures is a response to the fact that malaria parasites are becoming increasingly resistant to existing antimalarials, while the pharmaceutical industry has virtually abandoned research on tropical diseases (see Nature 386, 540; 1997).

The companies involved in JPMW — Takeda, Eisai, Yamanouchi, Chugai, Shionogi, Fujisawa, Sankyo, Daiichi, Suntory, Yoshitomi, Dainippon and Sumitomo Pharmaceuticals — will provide compounds from their chemical libraries for antimalarial screening.

The molecules will be screened by the Kitasato Institute in Tokyo, which plans to carry out random testing of more than 12,000 molecules over the next five years. Kitasato will also screen more than 2,000 molecules from its own libraries. Any molecule showing activity in the screening will be followed up by WHO's Programme on Tropical Diseases Research.

Win Gutteridge, the programme's chief of product research and development, says that the tools are already available to reduce the burden of malaria mortality and morbidity. But halving the figures within a decade, the declared aim of the Roll Back Malaria programme, “will only be possible if new tools, including antimalarials, are developed”.