Scynexis to help fight malaria

RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK, North Carolina and LIVERPOOL, U.K. (July 12, 2011) – The Innovative Vector Control Consortium (IVCC) announced today that it has signed an agreement with drug discovery and development company SCYNEXIS, Inc. to find potential candidate compounds suitable for development into new insecticide active ingredients to protect public health. New active ingredients are urgently needed to combat insecticide resistance which is a growing problem in the global fight against malaria.

Under the agreement, SCYNEXIS will screen its extensive chemical library, which was specifically targeted as insecticides, for activity against adult mosquitoes, and create a platform for screening other chemical libraries from companies and groups around the world. The project will aim to deliver a target list of compounds suitable for taking forward for further development.

Dr. Tom McLean, IVCC’s chief operating officer, said: “We look forward to working with SCYNEXIS and are hopeful that their expertise in insecticide discovery research will yield further candidates for development as new active ingredients. Disease control programmes rely on effective insecticides for vector control and resistance to all the insecticides currently approved for vector control is already present in some mosquito populations, posing a major threat to recent gains in malaria control. This project joins our other discovery programmes aimed at developing three new active ingredients unaffected by known resistance mechanisms by 2020.”

“SCYNEXIS is pleased to participate in this important project and looks forward applying