Sanofi-WHO Partnership Could Eliminate Sleeping Sickness By 2020

A side event to this week’s World Health Assembly highlighted progress being made in a public-private partnership on the elimination of sleeping sickness, a disease that occurs in some developing countries.

The event celebrated the 12th year of partnership between Sanofi and the World Health Organization on neglected tropical diseases (NTDs).

When the programme started, there were about 30,000 new cases of sleeping sickness per year, now there are about 6,000 per year, according to Robert Sebbag, vice president for Access to Medicines at Sanofi. Their treatments have saved the lives of some 200,000 people since 2001, he said.

Through the long-term partnership, recently renewed from 2011-2016, Sanofi contributes US$5 million per year to the joint project.

The programme was launched in 2001 with a focus on sleeping sickness. It since expanded to include leishmaniasis, Buruli ulcer, yaws and Chagas disease.

Sleeping sickness was made one of the 10 targeted diseases for control or elimination by 2020 under the 2012 London Agreement led by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Sebbag said the company is now looking at non-communicable diseases (NCDs) in developing countries, and chose two to focus on: epilepsy and mental health.

The lifetime risk of developing epilepsy is 1 percent, whether a person lives in a developed or developing country, he said.

There can be a stigma about epilepsy in developing countries, and that the first goal of the initiative is awareness of the disease, working with doctors and other caregivers to explain that this is a disease, not something like evil spirits or other cause, he said.

What is notable is that this is a case where the medicine is very cheap, about 2 euros for an entire year’s supply of one daily pill.

“The problem is not the cost of the drug,” said Sebbag, “but to train people to recognise it, and the last step is to stop the disease.”

The lifetime risk of developing schizophrenia is also 1 percent in any country, he said.

“We wanted to build a model with this type of disease,” said Sebbag.