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For further information, contact the MBL Communications Office at (508) 289-7423 or e-mail us at comm@mbl.edu
For Immediate Release: March 6, 2009
Contact: Diana Kenney, 508-289-7139; dkenney@mbl.edu
Database for New Tropical-Disease Drugs is a Hit
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Citation:
Agüero, F., et al. (2008) Genomic-scale prioritization of drug targets: the TDR Targets database. Nature Reviews Drug Discovery 7, doi: 10.1038/nrd2684.
The Campbell Lab
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Infectious tropical diseases pose major challenges in the developing world, but the discovery of new therapeutics to combat them has lagged. One reason is a limited understanding of potential drug targets for the infectious microbes that cause the diseases.
To remedy this, the World Health Organization has organized an international consortium of public and private partners, including Robert Campbell of the MBL Bay Paul Center, to create an open-access database on tropical disease pathogens and candidate drugs to treat them. The TDR Targets database (http://tdrtargets.org) compiles data on genes and proteins in tropical disease pathogens, along with known information on their potential as drug targets.
Researchers can query the database, scan the vast quantity of genomic datasets that are now available, and filter out and prioritize a shortlist of candidate drug targets that are suitable for further investigation. New pathogens and chemicals are continually added to improve the database.
As Campbell and his partners report in a recent article in Nature Reviews Drug Discovery, in the 16 months after its launch in 2007, TDR Targets attracted more than 10,000 visits from all over the world. More than a third of the visits originated from developing countries in which the targeted diseases are endemic.
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