Experts in the fields of organic, synthetic and medicinal chemistry, Australian company Epichem is best known for exporting its products and services to international clients, ranging from small drug discovery companies to multinational pharmaceutical corporations.

But the four-year-old company, which was founded by synthetic chemist Dr Wayne Best and a handful of colleagues after leaving the government-run WA Chemistry Centre in 2004, has another, more charitable side that often goes unnoticed.

For more than 10 years, the staff at Epichem and their collaborators in the Parasitology Group at nearby Murdoch University have persisted in their work to develop new drugs to treat African trypanosomiasis - also known as "sleeping sickness" - as well as other, similarly dangerous parasitic diseases that affect both people and animals.

According to Best and his chief collaborator Andrew Thompson, professor of parasitology at Murdoch University and president of the Australian Society for Parasitology, their pioneering research into combating parasites known as Trypanosomes struggled for years to find adequate funding.

"As you can imagine, when you're talking about making drugs for neglected diseases, it's difficult to get large amounts of money from pharmaceutical companies to fund that sort of work, and getting research grants is not always as easy as you'd like," Best says.

Indeed, over the years Best and Thompson applied for ARC grants, obtained funding from multinational pharmaceutical corporation GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) and even approached the World Health Organisation for assistance, to varying degrees of success.

In 2005, however, the project's fortunes changed when it caught the attention of the Drugs for Neglected Diseases Initiative (DNDi ), a non-profit drug development organisation dedicated to improving the health of people who suffer from diseases that are often overlooked by the major drug companies.

Based in Geneva, Switzerland, DNDi was founded in 2003 by Medecins Sans Frontieres and five public-sector research organisations - the Kenya Medical Research Institute, the Indian Council of Medical Research, the Malaysian Ministry of Health, the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation in Brazil, and France's Institut Pasteur.

The organisation targets diseases that afflict poor people in developing nations and other regions where the size of the market - and the profit margins - are not big enough to encourage big pharma to undertake research and development. Most of DNDi 's current projects focus on parasitic diseases, such as human African trypanosomiasis, leishmaniasis, Chagas disease and malaria.

In December of last year, DNDi received a $US25.7 million injection of funds from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, in the form of a grant to research and develop new medicines to treat human African trypanosomiasis and visceral leishmaniasis.

"Someone like Bill Gates is much happier to give his money to an organisation like DNDi because he knows that they're going to be able to use it more quickly and more effectively than is the case with bureaucracies," Best says.

"We've been on and off with this project over the last 10 years, but we've been a lot more successful since DNDi became involved in late 2005 because it is an organisation that's specifically designed to fund these sort of projects," says Thompson.

One of the advantages of DNDi coming onboard was that the organisation provided Epichem with enough funding to enable a pharmacokinetics group to join the project. Since 2006, Epichem and the Parasite Group at Murdoch have been collaborating closely with Melbourne's Centre for Drug Candidate Optimisation (CDCO), which operates out of the Victorian College of Pharmacy.

"Since CDCO came onboard a couple years ago, they've been providing a lot of very useful feedback in terms of the 'drugability' of our compounds," Best says. "So at the moment it's really a three-way collaboration between Epichem, Murdoch University and the CDCO."