This is some reading you guys can do for getting familiarize on what we intend to do with TDI and TSL. I have posted in our respective web sites a one-page flyer with the very basic information:
European Parliament Hearing on Neglected Diseases - European Public Health Alliance:
The hearing seeks to highlight the need for better regulatory practices which are more suitably adapted to assessing therapeutic advances of new drugs, vaccines and diagnostics for neglected diseases. These diseases include AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis, leishmansis, Chagas disease and sleeping sickness.
I have been introducing to the Stanford medical students what we do for the TDI and TSL initiatives. Achal S. Achrol is organizing a series of talks on Neglected Diseases and invited me to talk about our initiatives. You can see the slides here. I think that the audience was quite interested in the approach we are taking and hope we will have some of the folks joining TSL/TDI in a near future.
Achal and his collegues are very interested in implementing a wet-lab open-research community where scientists are able to share resources and information for a common goal... accelerating the drug discovery process for neglected diseases. There is certainly a good possibility of collaborating with them within the TSL initiative.
The feeds to papers on the left has gone, and the recent comments on the right is not updating. Also, for posting comments, there is the 'path alias' box. Could it be made a bit clearer what kind of information this is meant to contain - i.e. why it's useful?
PZQ synthesis page is now up on the main site, along with the first project. Pasting from the dev site worked very well, including the embedded images. Can you port over the images gallery wholesale, Ginger?
I'm hoping to include some more projects in the short term, with the biology ones top of the to do list.
Tagging papers with 'schisto' or 'praziquantel' seems to be working nicely for Connotea, which is very useful. I added the Schistosomiasis Control Initiative to the resources page.
We have designed a new synthesis of PZQ based on a catalytic, asymmetric aza-Henry reaction (Scheme 1). The key step is the generation of the new stereogenic centre in 4. From here, the reduction to 5 should be facile with e.g. samarium iodide.1 From 5, the two steps to PZQ are known from the original report.2
