Presently, there is no known cure or vaccine for this disease, which has resulted in the mosquito-borne virus spreading dramatically infecting about 50 million people each year, killing at least 12,000. Dengue is now endemic in more than 100 countries in Africa, the Americas, South-east Asia and the Western Pacific.
This collaboration aims to focus initially on identifying compounds for the treatment of Dengue Fever with options set in place for the development and commercialisation of discoveries in other therapeutic areas.
Within the collaboration MerLion, known for developing natural product-based medicines, will screen their natural compound collection against high throughput screens developed at Novartis Institute for Tropical Diseases (NITD) to identify new therapeutic compounds against a specific molecular target of dengue fever.
As part of the agreement, NITD may license in potential drug candidates from MerLion, developing them as part of a portfolio of treatments for neglected tropical diseases endemic in developing countries.
"Dengue fever is a widespread disease and has no known drug treatment. Naturally derived compounds offer an important opportunity to discover therapies for this infection, which affects 50 million people per year, with two-fifths of the world's population at risk of the disease," said Dr Tony Buss, CEO of MerLion.
Dengue is a mosquito-borne infection, which in recent years has become a major international public health concern. Dengue is found in tropical and sub-tropical regions around the world, predominantly in urban and semi-urban areas.
Singapore has suffered its worst outbreak of dengue fever in 2005, with over 13,000 cases reported: double those of 2004, which was in itself a record year for new cases.
Although environmental steps are important in controlling mosquito populations new drug therapies are vital in the control of the condition and for the reduction in mortality from dengue haemorrhagic fever.
Dengue haemorrhagic fever (DHF), a potentially lethal complication, was first recognised in the 1950s during the dengue epidemics in the Philippines and Thailand.
According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), DHF affects many other Asian countries and has become a leading cause of hospitalisation and death among children in several of them.
Dengue fever is an acute viral illness characterised by sudden onset of fever for 2-7 days, severe headache, muscle ache, joint pain, pain behind the eyeball, abdominal discomfort and rash.
Dengue infection may also present in the more severe and potentially fatal form, with severe bleeding and shock, known as dengue hemorrhagic fever/dengue shock syndrome.
It is caused by four types of dengue virus - dengue-1, -2, -3, and -4. Dengue infection is transmitted from an infected person to a susceptible individual through the bite of infected mosquitoes, principally Aedes aegypti.
Recovery from infection by one dengue serotype provides lifelong immunity against that serotype, but confers only partial and transient protection against subsequent infection by the other three serotypes.
This means that a person can acquire the dengue fever more than once. There is good evidence that sequential infection increases the risk of more serious disease resulting in DHF.