Mutombo felt helpless after another patient who had been treated with melarsoprol died. He thought he wouldn’t be able to find help in improving the course of treatment.
That changed more quickly than Mutombo could ever have expected.
In 2006, he learned that the nonprofit Drugs for Neglected Diseases Initiative (DNDi) was looking for researchers to conduct clinical trials and explore alternative treatments for sleeping sickness. Mutombo pounced on the opportunity. (HuffPost is currently raising money to support DNDi’s efforts to identify new drugs that are easy to administer.)
DNDi, which develops drugs and treatments for overlooked illnesses, hired Mutombo as a local investigator.
For the next three years, Mutombo immersed himself in research. He spent six months doing a clinical internship with Sanofis-Aventis, a France-based pharmaceutical company. He also spent half a year working in Geneva completing a fellowship with the World Health Organization.
Along with Doctors Without Borders and other partners, DNDi made a breakthrough in 2009: A treatment called nifurtimox-eflornithine combination therapy (NECT), which had a cure rate of more than 96 percent, was approved for people with stage-two sleeping sickness. Unlike another viable treatment that has been used in recent years, patients only need to receive 14 infusions over a period of a week together with a 10-day pill regimen.
It was a great step forward in treating the sleeping sickness, but its application came with a few challenges.
Patients have to undergo a spinal tap to determine where they are on the disease spectrum and how much medicine they need, and hospitals need staff members who are well-versed in administering the treatments. Clean needles aren’t easy to come by. The equipment is bulky and difficult to transport.
Patients also have to stay at a hospital for the duration of the treatment. For people living in rural areas, especially now that the country is on the brink of a civil war, it can take hours or even days to get to a clinic ? if they can get there at all.