Professor Paul O’Neill and Dr David Hong, from the University’s Department of Chemistry, along with Professor Steve Ward and Dr Giancarlo Biagini from Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, visited China to mark the opening of Liverpool- Guangdong University of Technology Joint Laboratory for Drug Discovery.
The lab will facilitate research projects for treatments for diseases such as tuberculosis and malaria.
Its aim is to pool expertise in developing drugs for diseases which primarily affect some of the world’s poorest people such as malaria and tuberculosis, and diseases which have less attention focused on them such as river blindness and elephantiasis.
Professor O’Neill said: “Malaria and tuberculosis kill around three million people a year, yet the resources devoted to developing medicines for these diseases are comparatively low. By combining the differing expertise of the three groups involved we will be able to increase the speed at which new drugs are developed.”
The research team will now focus on developing new molecules for the treatment of neglected tropical diseases and then swiftly advance them to trials and deployment in poorer parts of the world.
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