Prolexys Pharmaceuticals, Inc. is participating in an international consortium of investigators who have joined together to work on a project entitled "Drugs for the Treatment of Latent Tuberculosis Infection".

The consortium is supported by a $20 million grant to Imperial College from the Grand Challenges in Global Health initiative, which was launched in 2003 to attract scientists, researchers and inventors to develop solutions to global health problems. The Imperial College consortium is one of 43 projects chosen by the Grand Challenges initiative from more than 1,500 project ideas submitted by scientists around the world.

The goal of the project is to develop novel drugs that combat latent TB, currently estimated to reside in about 2 billion people world-wide. Prolexys will be responsible for the proteomics component of the project. The company will create a comprehensive protein-protein interaction map of the TB bacterium using their proprietary HyNet and HySpec technology platforms.

Funding for the Grand Challenges initiative is provided by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Wellcome Trust, and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research.

"The detailed protein interaction map will shed a light on potential mechanisms of TB latency and therefore facilitate the discovery of drugs that eliminate the latent infection," said Dr. Gary Schoolnik, Consortium Member, and Professor of Medicine (Infectious Diseases), Microbiology and Immunology at Stanford University.

Tuberculosis (TB) is a devastating bacterial disease that kills nearly 2 million people every year. One third of all people in the world are latently infected with the TB bacterium, and there is a huge unmet need for drugs that reduce the length of treatment and that can also eliminate latent TB.