Hannah Sachs-Wetstone

Interested in more global health innovation news? Every week GHTC scours media reports worldwide to deliver essential global health R&D news and content to your inbox. Sign up now to receive our weekly R&D News Roundup email.Last week, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) announced plans for a US$1.76 million investment to advance and expand the scope and technology of the Spillover app, a platform created at the University of California, Davis that could be key to identifying and preparing for “Disease X,” a virus with pandemic potential that has yet to be identified. The platform includes a database with more than 500,000 samples from an estimated 74,000 animals in 28 different countries around the world, and CEPI’s investments will further its capabilities to identify viruses that are most likely to spill over to humans. The platform is hoping to use that data to prioritize and streamline investments in a library of vaccines, aimed at protecting against the viral families that pose the greatest threats, that are ready to be adapted against “Disease X” within 100 days of its identification.South Africa will begin piloting a new every-other-month HIV prevention shot as new modelling released last week showed that the shot could prevent as many as 52,000 new infections over the next 20 years if rolled out nationally. The pilot will begin after approval from the South African Health Products Regulatory Authority, which is expected early next year. Two large clinical trials found that the shot was more effective than the oral HIV prevention pill, Truvada, in part because it is taken much less frequently than the daily pill. However, the shot will only be available, at least in the short-term, in small pilot projects, and the high price is still a major barrier to the product being cost-effective in South Africa.Results from the STREAM clinical trial, shared last week at the Union World Conference at Lung Health showed that two shorter treatment regimens for multi-drug resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) including a fully oral nine-month bedaquiline-based regimen and a six-month injection-containing regimen have been shown to be safer and more effective that the nine-month regimen, which combines pills and injections, that is still in wide use. The STREAM trial was the largest-ever MDR-TB trial ever conducted with more than 1,000 participants across eight countries. The findings from the trial strengthen the evidence for bedaquiline as a component of improved drug-resistant therapies (bedaquiline is also a component of the six-month BPaL and BPaLM regimens, which were endorsed for use against most forms of drug-resistant tuberculosis in the World Health Organization's rapid communication on tuberculosis treatment guidelines released earlier this year).

Interested in more global health innovation news? Every week GHTC scours media reports worldwide to deliver essential global health R&D news and content to your inbox. Sign up now to receive our weekly R&D News Roundup email.Last week, Pfizer announced promising results from their late-stage clinical trial for an experimental vaccine candidate for respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), which has been causing serious concern in recent weeks. The vaccine was administered to pregnant individuals with the goal of protecting infants upon their birth. The trial found that the vaccine candidate was 82 percent effective against severe illness for infants in their first 90 days and 69 percent effective through their first six months. The Pfizer vaccine is one of several candidates that are expected to undergo review from the US Food and Drug Administration later this year.As the Ebola outbreak in Uganda continues, three experimental vaccine candidates aimed at protecting against the Sudan strain of the virus (for which there are no approved vaccines) have been sent to Uganda to be administered to people and to help generate more data for clinical trials. The candidates include one vaccine developed by Oxford University and manufactured by the Serum Institute, one developed by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and licensed to the Sabin Vaccine Institute, and one candidate from Merck. Doses of all three vaccines will be deployed to Uganda through a joint effort with the World Health Organization and the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the coming weeks and months.A new study conducted in Mali showed that a single dose of monoclonal antibodies provided protection from malaria infection for up to six months. While monoclonal antibodies are notoriously expensive to produce and complex to administrate, the lab-made antibodies employed in the study could prove to be a key tool to protect children and pregnant individuals in the fight against malaria, at least in the short-to-medium term. This study follows another last year, which showed that intravenous administration of the antibody prevented infection in all nine participants.

Interested in more global health innovation news? Every week GHTC scours media reports worldwide to deliver essential global health R&D news and content to your inbox. Sign up now to receive our weekly R&D News Roundup email.While the COVID-19 pandemic has led to serious setbacks in progress against tuberculosis (TB) with mortality now rising again after a slow but steady decline before the pandemic, COVID-19 has also demonstrated the feasibility of large-scale investment into the rapid development of urgently needed technologies when political will and a sense of urgency exists. Researchers were working on developing new tests, drugs, and vaccines for TB before the pandemic, including one vaccine candidate currently in advanced clinical trials that was developed by GSK and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Now, powerful technologies that were employed in the development of vaccines for COVID-19, like messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA), are starting to be employed against TB, with BioNTech and Pfizer planning trials of an mRNA TB vaccine in the next few months.The World Health Organization (WHO) has published its first-ever list of fungal priority pathogens in response to the expanding geographic range of dangerous fungi due to climate change, the rise in cases of fungal disease during the COVID-19 pandemic, and the growth in resistance of fungal diseases to treatments. The list includes 19 pathogens that have been identified as posing the greatest threat to human health. The goal of publishing the list is to catalyze funding for research into fungal infections, which receives less than 1.5 percent of all funding for infectious diseases, as well as to encourage improvements to the treatment guidelines for these infections.The University of Minnesota’s Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy (CIDRAP) recently published a draft of a Coronavirus Vaccines Research and Development Roadmap, a project supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and The Rockefeller Foundation, for public review and comment. The roadmap, which builds on lessons learned from the development of successful COVID-19 vaccines, identifies strategies to develop effective vaccines for new COVID-19 variants as well as coronaviruses that have yet to emerge. In particular, the roadmap emphasizes the need for durable, broadly protective vaccines that are simple to deliver and that protect against multiple coronaviruses.

At GHTC, we get to read stories every day about incredible innovations in global health. Most of the technologies we see are inventive, some are revolutionary, and a few are so unusual, one might think they were ripped from the pages of a science fiction novel. Now, we’re testing how well you know these global health technologies with our annual Halloween game: the TRICK or TREATment quiz.For each question, we will present a description of a global health technology. Choose TREATment if you believe this innovation exists. Choose TRICK if you think we are trying to pull one over on you and, instead, the product is still in development or is just a figment of our imagination. 

Interested in more global health innovation news? Every week GHTC scours media reports worldwide to deliver essential global health R&D news and content to your inbox. Sign up now to receive our weekly R&D News Roundup email.Regulators in Zimbabwe have approved long-acting injectable cabotegravir, (CAB-LA), making the country the first in Africa and the third in the world (after Australia and the United States) to approve the drug. The World Health Organization (WHO) called the approval a “crucial step” and noted that it would support the implementation and distribution of the prevention method in the country to maximize impact. WHO previously issued a recommendation for CAB-LA in July that cited its high efficacy in reducing HIV transmission among high-risk individuals.A research team from the University of Cape Town published new findings showing evidence that a cancer drug currently in clinical trials has shown potential in protecting from, curing, and preventing malaria transmission. The investigational drug, sapanisertib, acts by killing the human malaria parasite in the liver, the human host red blood cell, and when it divides sexually within the host red blood cells. This is an incredibly significant finding as the drug exhibits a novel mechanism of action as well as activity against multiple stages of the parasite life cycle. Further research could lead to the development of a critically needed novel malaria drug that contributes to malaria control and elimination efforts as well as addresses drug resistance.The United States provided Gilead Sciences’ antiviral, remdesivir, and Mapp Biopharmaceutical Inc’s experimental antibody drug, MBP134, to Uganda in an effort to help prevent further cases and deaths in the outbreak, which is now the largest outbreak of the Sudan strain of Ebola in over 20 years. Both Ugandan and US government officials noted the need for treatment to protect the lives of health care workers, which is a key step in containment.