On Oct. 26th Pfizer announced that it was going to give some researchers access to its compound library to search for targets that might lead to anti-parasitic medicines. Pfizer will also share cutting edge/industry methods for drug discovery for some of these disease catagories: malaria, leishmaniasis, African trypanosomiasis, onchocerciasis, schistosomiasis and Chagas’ disease. As far as I know this is one of the first times a major pharma company has opened up its compound library. You can read the full story here or here.

You can also reader further about strategies for developing drugs for neglected diseases in this article published last year.

This story was found on a fantastic website: WorldChanging -“Cell phone ring tones are now music to the ears of the 35 million Bangladeshis at risk for numerous cancers and debilitating impairments from groundwater tainted with arsenic… colleagues at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University are working to reduce the exposure to arsenic through their development of an SMS… A pilot project incorporated data from 300,000 wells into the Welltracker database, which reports for each village the number of wells tested, the proportion of unsafe wells and, when available, the start depth together with an estimate of the probability that the estimate is correct. “ The information is well laid out along with video at WorldChanging, check it out.

From the Columbia University website:
“Welltracker helps people in rural Bangladesh avoid arsenic poisoning occurring naturally in about 50% of private tube wells. Despite warnings from the government, many villagers cannot afford to dig tube wells deeper than 40ft. They continue to install shallow tube wells at a fast pace…Welltracker makes safe tube wells more affordable. Instead of the typical 800ft depth of a deep tube well, we use mathematics and statistics to find shallower safe depths. We encourage communities to invest in deep tube wells together. Our intention is to help set up an independent organization that provides loans and secures well investment with a money-back arsenic-free guarantee.”