Medicines for Malaria Venture and deepmirror have launched Drug Design for Global Health, or dd4gh, a free AI drug discovery platform for eligible researchers working on malaria, tuberculosis and neglected tropical diseases.
In the launch release and on the platform site, the partners said the service is funded in part by the Gates Foundation and is intended for non-commercial global health research.
MMV and deepmirror said dd4gh combines predictive and generative AI, uses active learning to improve predictions from new experimental data, and is designed to analyze large datasets and propose compounds for laboratory testing.
The dd4gh site also says researchers can use pre-trained models built on curated MMV datasets before they generate their own data.
Who can access it and on what terms
The dd4gh site says licenses are granted to individual researchers, not institutions, and applicants must be involved in compound design, work on diseases relevant to global health and use the platform for non-commercial research.
The same site says approved users can schedule an optional virtual onboarding session with the deepmirror team. Uploaded data remains private and is not shared with other researchers.
The researcher community the platform was built with
In a September 2025 post, deepmirror said MMV and deepmirror brought together more than 40 scientists in Geneva to help adapt the platform ahead of its March 2026 launch, then planned a second workshop in Accra focused on African-based researchers working on diseases including malaria, tuberculosis and neglected tropical diseases.
The live dd4gh site carries a quote from University of Cape Town PhD candidate Caroline Maina saying AI tools for drug discovery are known to researchers in resource-limited settings, but licensing costs can still put them out of reach.
The funding gap the platform is designed to work against
WHO’s neglected-disease R&D dashboard, based on G-FINDER data, says neglected-disease R&D investment totaled about $3.93 billion in 2022 and remained heavily concentrated in HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria, which together accounted for more than 70% of total funding.
WHO also says the G-FINDER framework defines neglected diseases partly by market failure, meaning the commercial market is not sufficient to attract enough private R&D for needed products.
The newer G-FINDER 2024 report points in the same direction. Its summary says global funding for neglected-disease basic research and product development reached $4.17 billion in 2023, leaving it nearly $650 million below its 2018 peak.
MMV says it contributes global health datasets and medicinal chemistry expertise in malaria and neglected-disease drug discovery, while deepmirror provides the AI and machine learning platform. Researchers who meet the eligibility rules can now apply directly through dd4gh.ai.