(Yicai Global) June 16 -- The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has renewed its collaboration with the Beijing municipal government and Tsinghua University to improve health outcomes worldwide through lifesaving therapies for infectious diseases such as tuberculosis and malaria.

The Gates Foundation will donate USD50 million to the Global Health Drug Discovery Institute over the next five years, the foundation announced yesterday after its founder and co-Chair Bill Gates arrived in the Chinese capital on his first visit to China since 2019.

The GHDDI was founded by the Gates Foundation, Tsinghua University, and the Beijing city government in 2016. It mainly focuses on developing new drugs for communicable diseases, including TB and malaria, which disproportionately affect the world’s poorest and most vulnerable groups.

The Beijing government will match the efforts of the Gates Foundation to bolster the institute’s drug discovery capacity. Meanwhile, Tsinghua University will continue to support the GHDDI in areas such as building and sharing research platforms, translating research discovery, and developing talent.

“We are excited to see the GHDDI’s growing potential within the global health drug innovation ecosystem,” said Zheng Zhijie, China director of the Gates Foundation. “With this new funding, we hope the GHDDI will continue to drive research and development breakthroughs, ultimately improving the availability and accessibility of drugs for those in need around the world.”

The mRNA technology makes vaccines against diseases such as TB and malaria possible, according to Gates.

In his speech yesterday, Gates mentioned a preclinical antimalarial candidate the GHDDI developed in collaboration with Medicines for Malaria Venture and Malaria Drug Accelerator. The candidate demonstrated promising potential in reducing drug resistance, minimizing dosage, and even preventing malaria, he noted.

The challenge of drug resistance is a high priority for global health. The parasites that cause malaria have developed resistance to many medicines in use today, making them not as effective as they used to be. Moreover, treatment regimens require patients to take the drug for three days, and many people cannot complete the entire course, while new drug candidates may be able to cure malaria with just one dose.

Yicai Global learned that the GHDDI, in collaboration with several international R&D centers, has discovered a series of novel compounds that synergize with existing TB drugs, promising to dramatically shorten the course of TB treatments from the standard four to six months to just one to two months.

Editor: Futura Costaglione