The University of Dundee has announced a three-year, $5 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in support of research into tackle some of the world’s deadliest diseases.

The funding will support the university’s Structure-guided Drug Discovery Coalition (SDDC), which is working to identify new drugs to tackle malaria and tuberculosis. According to the World Health Organization, an estimated 241 million clinical cases of malaria in 2020 led to more than 600,000 deaths, while approximately 10 million people worldwide had clinical tuberculosis, with approximately 1.5 million deaths.

The collaboration involves researchers from the University of Washington in Seattle, Seattle Children’s Research Institute, University of Chicago, and the Center of Medicinal Chemistry at the University of Campinas in São Paulo, Brazil.

“In this project we aim to develop potential lead compounds,” said Ian Gilbert, head of the UD chemistry department. “Our starting points are high-quality drug targets, typically enzymes, which we can link to a compound that kills the malaria parasite or the TB bacterium. We use information such as the three-dimensional structures of these enzymes to design potential drugs.”

(Photo credit: Getty Images/dra schwartz)