Tokyo – September 18, 2026 -- The Global Health Innovative Technology (GHIT) Fund has launched NTDpedia, a digital encyclopedia targeting the awareness gap that keeps neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) underfunded despite affecting 1.5 billion people worldwide.
GHIT Fund targets awareness gap as root cause of NTD underfunding
The platform, titled "NTDpedia: Your Guide to Neglected Tropical Diseases," is designed as an accessible digital resource covering all 21 disease groups recognized by the World Health Organization, including viral, bacterial, parasitic, and fungal infections, snakebite envenoming, and noma. Supervised by Prof. Kenji Hirayama of Nagasaki University, the site aims to make complex health issues understandable to a general audience, including students, teachers, companies, and advocates.
SDG 3 mandate to end NTD epidemics by 2030 remains off track
Sustainable Development Goal 3 calls for ending NTD epidemics by 2030 under the "Leaving No One Behind" banner, yet these diseases remain severely underfunded. GHIT Fund CEO Osamu Kunii said the greatest barrier to ending NTDs is not only the lack of medical tools but also lack of awareness and societal apathy, and that NTDpedia was built to convert a distant problem into something the public can understand and act on.
Platform links climate change, poverty, and child health to disease spread
NTDpedia organizes content around four key phrases connecting NTDs to daily concerns: climate change, which expands disease geography into high-income nations as warming combines with global travel and trade; poor sanitation and poverty, showing how unsafe water and crowded housing sustain disease cycles that deepen poverty; children at high risk, highlighting diseases that affect growth, schooling, and lifelong health; and diseases once common in Japan that have since disappeared from living memory. A separate transmission-based classification groups diseases by parasites, bacteria, viruses, insects, other animals, water/soil, or other routes.
Fund positions public awareness as precursor to R&D investment
The GHIT Fund frames NTDpedia as a mechanism to build public support that ultimately drives investment in drugs, vaccines, and diagnostics for NTDs. The fund is a Japan-based public-private partnership formed by the Government of Japan, multiple pharmaceutical companies, the Gates Foundation, Wellcome, and the United Nations Development Programme, which mobilizes Japanese industry, academia, and research institutes to develop treatments for malaria, tuberculosis, and neglected tropical diseases.