Computational Models for Neglected Diseases: Gaps and Opportunities

Abstract

Neglected diseases, such as Chagas disease, African sleeping sickness, and intestinal worms, affect millions of the world’s poor. They disproportionately affect marginalized populations, lack effective treatments or vaccines, or existing products are not accessible to the populations affected. Computational approaches have been used across many of these diseases for various aspects of research or development, and yet data produced by computational approaches are not integrated and widely accessible to others. Here, we identify gaps in which computational approaches have been used for some neglected diseases and not others. We also make recommendations for the broad-spectrum integration of these techniques into a neglected disease drug discovery and development workflow.

Keywords: African sleeping sickness, Chagas disease, computational models, leishmaniasis, malaria, schistosomiasis, tuberculosis.