NextBillion - An Initiative of the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan

Tuesday, May 20, 2014

A meeting on drug discovery and development run by The International Society for Neglected Tropical Diseases in London, United Kingdom, yesterday, brimmed with useful tips and resources for the research community. One of them was the just-launched space on The Global Health Network’s website dedicated to collaboration on neglected tropical diseases (NTDs).

“It’s a democratic space,” said Trudie Lang, researcher from the University of Oxford, United Kingdom, who presented it. “It’s for the NTD community to make use of it.”

The network also has a section called Site Finder, which takes thetechnology behind dating sites and puts it to use for scientists to find sites where they could do their clinical trials.

Lang said that clinical trials often leave behind great infrastructure and trained staff desperately looking for more work — and the tool allows other researchers to find sites that have been set up for one trial, and use them for further trials, perhaps on another disease altogether.