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“We have never had such a sophisticated arsenal of technologies for treating diseases, yet the gap in health outcomes keep getting wider. This is unacceptable.” This claim was made by the Director-General of the World Health Organization (WHOa), Margaret Chan, in 2007. Since then, a special Outlook dedicated to neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) has been published by Nature. 1 Nowadays, NTDs affect more than one billion people (one-sixth of the world’s population), 2 and in aggregate, NTDs cause almost 550000 deaths annually. 3 Surprisingly, the NTDs drug discovery pipeline is still almost dry. Low returns of investments have discouraged drug companies from investing in research projects devoted to the discovery of novel drug candidates for NTDs. 4 At an academic level, where publications rather than direct contribution to practical social good are currently rewarded, the translational gap in drug …