Diarrheal Diseases Partnerships

Novartis Partnership

iOWH recently signed a collaboration agreement with Novartis to discover and develop a novel therapy for secretory diarrhea, a deadly disease that kills more than 1.6 million children in the developing world each year. The agreement will allow iOWH to select promising drug candidates that are ready for pre-clinical testing from OneWorld Health’s research pipelines. OneWorld Health and the Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research joined forces to discover drugs to treat infectious diarrhea via inhibition of the Cystic Fibrosis Transmembrane Conductance Regulator (CFTR) chloride channel.

Through their extensive work in cystic fibrosis research, Novartis scientists have gained insights into the structure and function of CFTR, which will be applied to discovering a CFTR inhibitor for secretory diarrhea.

Roche Partnership

In the spring of 2008, iOWH entered into a research collaboration with Roche under which iOWH was able to screen over 780,000 from Roche’s compound library to identify a potential new drug for the treatment of diarrheal diseases. In May 2009, iOWH announced that it had successfully completed our first screening campaign and would select up to 40 new drug leads for further study intended to identify a new treatment for childhood diarrhea.