DNDi Honors Single-Dose Sleeping Sickness Cure, Pandemic Antiviral

A nonprofit drug developer honored two research teams this week for work that could reshape how the world treats one of Africa's oldest neglected diseases — and how it prepares for the next coronavirus pandemic. DNDi named its 2026 Projects of the Year at an October meeting of its Scientific Advisory Committee, recognizing an open-science antiviral candidate built for future pandemics and the team that turned acoziborole, the first single-dose oral Sleeping Sickness cure, into a registered medicine.

The two projects were chosen by the organization's executive board from nominations by its Scientific Advisory Committee, from a research portfolio of more than 40 projects. One award went to the pre-clinical antiviral candidate ASAP-0017445. The other recognized the chemistry, manufacturing, and controls team that carried acoziborole, the Sleeping Sickness drug, through registration in partnership with Sanofi.

A One-Day Sleeping Sickness Cure Decades in the Making

For most of history, Sleeping Sickness was treated with punishing regimens. An arsenic-based drug called melarsoprol could kill the parasite but also killed some patients. Later options improved safety yet still required either a 10-day course of oral medicine or a combination of injections and oral therapy for advanced cases. In the remote villages where the disease is endemic, those regimens were often simply out of reach.

Acoziborole changes that calculus. The treatment is a single dose of three tablets, taken in one day, without hospitalization. In a phase 2/3 study it showed up to 96 percent success rates at 18 months across both early and advanced stages of the most common form of the disease, which is caused by the parasite Trypanosoma brucei gambiense, according to DNDi.

The road to registration was long. DNDi and Sanofi worked as an integrated team on the chemistry, manufacturing, and controls program, navigating changes in the manufacturing network and the difficulties of producing a low-volume Sleeping Sickness drug for a neglected tropical disease, according to DNDi. A registration dossier went to the European Medicines Agency through the EU-M4all procedure in 2025, followed by a positive opinion from the agency's human medicines committee in February 2026 and approval in the Democratic Republic of the Congo later that year — paving the way for wider access in endemic countries.

The practical difference is hard to overstate. Sleeping Sickness, spread by the bite of an infected tsetse fly, is almost always fatal without treatment, and most patients live in remote parts of Central and West Africa. A medicine that works in a single day, without a hospital stay, can reach people who previously had to travel to distant treatment centers. Sanofi has said it will donate the medicine to the World Health Organization through its philanthropic arm, Foundation S, in support of the WHO goal of eliminating the disease by 2030. You can find more coverage of experimental medicines on our Health topic page.

An Open-Science Antiviral Built Before the Next Pandemic

The second honoree is not a product but a preparation. The candidate, developed through the COVID Moonshot — a crowdsourced collaboration launched in 2020 after researchers shared fragment-screening data from the Diamond Light Source in the United Kingdom — targets the coronavirus main protease, an enzyme essential for viral replication. Researchers worldwide submitted more than 18,000 molecule designs, and every stage of the discovery process was disclosed openly so others could build on the work, as reported by MedicalXpress.

Lab work has shown activity against SARS-CoV, SARS-CoV-2, and MERS-CoV — viruses in the same family with pandemic potential. The compound was nominated as a pre-clinical candidate in September 2025 after optimization to improve potency and pharmacokinetic properties, according to DNDi. From the start, the project aimed for a direct-to-generic, royalty-free medicine that could be manufactured cheaply and made widely available — an explicit response to the inequities in antiviral access seen during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The candidate remains pre-clinical, and the road from a promising molecule to an approved drug is long and expensive — most candidates never make it. Pandemic-preparedness funding also has a habit of surging during emergencies and fading once they pass, which means projects like this must survive years of quiet before they matter. The bet behind this year's honors is that doing the open-science work now, with the data shared freely, will leave the world better stocked the next time a coronavirus emerges.

What Comes Next for the Sleeping Sickness Breakthrough

The two awards tell a single story about how neglected-disease research gets done: slowly, collaboratively, and with an eye on access from the start. Acoziborole still needs an update to the World Health Organization's Sleeping Sickness treatment guidelines and approval in more endemic countries before most Sleeping Sickness patients benefit — the DRC approval is a first step, not the finish line. For readers interested in other experimental treatments, see our story on a glioblastoma drug that crosses the blood-brain barrier.

From a broad-spectrum coronavirus inhibitor drug candidate driven by open science to the manufacturing work that enabled registration of a one-day cure for Sleeping Sickness, “collaborative R&D can carry bold ideas towards practical, equitable tools that support global health objectives,” according to Dr Laurent Fraisse, DNDi's research and development director. For patients in the most remote endemic villages — and for a world still vulnerable to the next coronavirus — that is the point.