This week, MMV’s independent Expert Scientific Advisory Committee (ESAC) convened in Nyon, Switzerland for its annual review of MMV’s R&D portfolio and on-going projects. During the meeting, the ESAC announced that it had selected mCMQ069, a compound with potency on multiple stages of the malaria parasite lifecycle, as MMV’s Project of the Year 2023. The compound was discovered through a collaboration between Calibr-Skaggs at Scripps Research (a non-profit research institute in San Diego) and MMV, with Dr Anil Gupta and Dr James Duffy serving as project leads for the respective organizations. The compound has the potential, from a single oral dose, to cure patients, prevent malaria infections, counter drug resistance and drive new progress towards elimination.
Established in 2001, the Project of the Year is an internal MMV award that recognizes the most exciting drug discovery and development projects in the MMV portfolio and the scientific partners involved. MMV projects are subject to rigorous industry-style management and the Project of the Year is one that meets our demanding product profiles, has made rapid progress and has achieved its milestones.
This year’s award recognizes the outstanding scientific work of the Calibr-Skaggs/MMV discovery team which led to the identification of mCMQ069, a novel compound with high efficacy and a long predicted duration of action in humans. As a novel compound with potential for low-dose treatment, it could provide an alternative to the current artemisinin-based therapies, for which partial drug resistance has been detected in Asia and more recently in Africa.1, 2, 3
mCMQ069 may also have the capacity to meet the oral chemoprevention goal of protective efficacy following a single monthly oral dose. A chemoprevention product given orally once per month would improve wide-scale malaria prevention strategies by simplifying administration, with potential for increasing treatment compliance while remaining cost effective for a broad range of populations. A single-dose product of this type could replace the current 3-day regime used for seasonal malaria chemoprevention (SMC) and facilitate broader roll-out.
This year’s ESAC nomination recognizes the team’s rigorous focus on the optimization process over several years, which is critical to achieving such challenging target candidate profiles. Congratulations to Dr Anil Gupta, Dr Arnab Chatterjee, Dr Case McNamara, Dr Jenya Antonova-Koch and Dr Peter Schultz from the project team at Calibr-Skaggs, and Dr James Duffy, Dr Anne Cooper and Dr Peter Webborn at MMV for this recognition of scientific excellence.