Summer profiles: unlocking treatment for neglected diseases

On Inside Geneva, we bring you part three of our summer profile series. This week we talk to a doctor looking for treatments for some of the world’s most neglected diseases. “Neglect means that there are diseases that affect an important proportion of humanity but for which no new drugs have been developed because there is no money in it. Because they affect very poor populations in remote rural areas,” explains Olaf Valverde, clinical project leader at Drugs for Neglected Diseases (DNDi). Subscribe to 'Inside Geneva' on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Valverde is the clinical lead on a project looking for treatments for sleeping sickness. “It’s a disease caused by a small parasite that almost always kills if untreated. During the first half of the 20th century there were huge epidemics. It not only destroyed communities but also caused the desertification of entire regions of Africa,” he adds. Cases of sleeping sickness with no effective treatment had ...