A World Health Organisation adviser has appealed to academic chemists and to the drug industry to give tropical disease researchers access to their chemicals. The researchers need to screen them for their potential in combating tropical diseases.

John Ryley, adviser to the special programme for research and training in tropical diseases, established by WHO, the World Bank and the UN Development Programme, said that major tropical diseases such as sleeping sickness, Chagas disease and leishmaniasis were being "largely ignored", even though research is rapidly advancing in chemotherapy for other diseases. New antimicrobial agents to fight such diseases are desperately needed in the third world, he said.

But drug companies cannot make enough profit on these drugs, and academics often study them for other applications.

Speaking before a conference to celebrate 50 years of the Society for General Microbiology, Dr Ryley said: "I would like to see more academics and drug companies submitting to us small quantities of compounds that they have made for other purposes." Examples might include potential cancer or anti-fungal treatments.

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"It is understandable that pharmaceutical firms can no longer justify work directed at tropical diseases, with the possible exception of malaria," he said. "Yet they could cooperate with other agencies in supplying substances for evaluation, particularly recently synthesised ones made with similar targets in view, and by providing information on the toxicology of their own compounds."

Simon Croft, senior lecturer at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, who runs a WHO-funded scheme that screens potentially useful compounds, said more help from industry and academics would be welcome.

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He said that funding for academic research was suffering because charities risk their charitable status if they fund research on products approaching the market.