Wealth Paper

RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil (AP) - Brazil announced a new malaria treatment Thursday that scientists say offers a potentially cheap and effective way to attack a disease that largely afflicts the world’s poor.
The treatment, developed by the Brazilian government in conjunction with the Drugs for Neglected Diseases Initiative, combines existing malaria drugs artesunate and mefloquine into a single, fixed-dose tablet and reduces the cost of treatment.
A key benefit is that it reduces the number of tablets patients must remember to swallow.
“Now they only need take one to two tablets a day for three days,” said Bernard Pecoul, executive director of the Drugs for Neglected Diseases Initiative, an international alliance of seven health organizations.
“The fixed dose combination will probably mean greater adherence to the treatment program,” said Keith Carter, regional adviser on malaria at the Pan American Health Organization, who was not involved with the treatment’s development.
Carter said he had not seen the result of the Brazilian study and could not comment on it. But he noted that the World Health Organization has recommended similar combination treatments for several years and said development of a single, fixed-dose medication should make treatment easier and more effective.
Another single-dose combination is available to fight malaria, but Pecoul said this combination was more effective.
Pecoul said developers would not try to patent the new treatment because they are trying to reduce the cost of attacking a disease that mainly affects the poor.
The Brazilian government will distribute the medication, known as ASMQ, free of charge and will transfer the technology to India for production and distribution in Southeast Asia, where a full course of treatment should cost around US$2.50 (1.58).
A field study involving 17,000 patients in Brazil’s Amazon state of Acre showed that the incidence of malaria dropped by 70 percent over a year, Pecoul said. A similar study in the Peruvian Amazon where the two drugs were used in separate doses only showed a drop of 50 percent.
Carlos Morel, one of the drug’s developers and director of Brazil’s Center for Developing Medical Technology at Fiocruz/Farmanginhos, said the number of patients hospitalized with malaria in the Brazilian region dropped from 2,500 to only 500 over the course of the year.
Malaria is a mosquito-borne disease caused by a parasite. The less time each person spends infected, the less likely it is to spread.
“This is really good news in a field where there hasn’t been much good news lately,” Morel said.

via AOL

LONDON - Brazil launched a new treatment for malaria on Thursday, marking the latest step in a global program to make cheap two-in-one pills available to millions at risk from the mosquito-borne killer.

The country’s state-run drugmaker Farmanguinhos is working with the Drugs for Neglected Diseases Initiative (DNDi), a non-profit group based in Geneva, to bring the medicine to market at a target price of $2.50 for a full adult treatment.

The Brazilian market is just the first stop.

The fixed-dose combination, known as ASMQ, will be made available to children and adults throughout Latin America and southeast Asia over the course of 2008 and 2009, with India’s Cipla Ltd supplying the Asian market.

The drug is not protected by any patents and will be sold at cost by the suppliers, both of which have a track record of bringing cheap generic AIDS medicines to market.

Jean Rene Kiechel, the project’s manager, told Reuters the medicine would be cheaper and more effective than existing therapy. He estimated it could treat between 2 million and 3 million patients in the next three years.

ASMQ belongs to a new generation of artemisinin-based combination therapies, or ACT drugs, which are recommended by the World Health Organization because of growing resistance to older treatments such as chloroquine.

Malaria, caused by a parasite carried by mosquitoes, kills more than 1 million people a year worldwide, with Africa the continent hardest hit.

DNDi, working with Sanofi-Aventis SA, launched its first combination treatment for Africa last year but that medicine is ill-suited to fighting malaria in Latin America and Southeast Asia, where there are different resistance problems.

ASMQ combines artesunate, a derivative of artemisinin, with another antimalarial drug, mefloquine.

These drugs are already given widely to treat cases of malaria in Latin America and southeast Asia but the combined price of buying them separately is between $4 and $7.

“This will be much better in terms of cost,” Kiechel said.

It also simplifies treatment, with patients taking a single daily dose of one or two tablets for three days, depending on their age, which ensures the two component drugs are taken together and in the correct proportion.

ASMQ will not be as cheap as the combination drug used in Africa, which mixes artesunate and amodiaquine and sells for around $1. Kiechel said this reflected the particularly complex production process for mefloquine.

via MSN