Breakthroughs Blog: Vaccines

For many mothers and babies around the world, the first 48 hours after birth are the most dangerous of their lives. For eight years, Saving Lives at Birth—spearheaded by USAID—has challenged problem solvers worldwide to create innovative solutions to make birth safer and save lives. Here are ten incredible innovations from this initiative: Many newborns struggle to breathe. While in developed countries, doctors use CPAP machines, these devices are too costly for most health facilities in low-resource nations. Fortunately, innovators at Rice University have developed a low-cost solution—the Pumani bCPAP. Delivering comparable treatment at 1/15th the cost, the Pumani has tripled the survival rate of babies with respiratory distress.   Blood pressure (BP) disorders like pre-eclampsia are a leading cause of maternal death. BP cuffs have been used to monitor BP since the early 1900s, but they can be hard to maintain and read by less-skilled health workers. A startup named Biospectal is reinventing this approach. It has developed the OptiBP, a cuff-less smartphone app that allows instant, accurate BP monitoring through a fingertip.   Affecting 60% of newborns, jaundice can cause brain damage or death if left untreated. In low-resource nations, doctors often don’t have access to costly lab equipment needed to diagnose the disorder. That’s where the BiliSpec comes in. Developed by Rice University, this handheld, battery-powered device can diagnose jaundice within two minutes using just a $0.05 paper strip and a drop of blood.   Even a small dip in a newborn’s temperature can put her life at risk. Continuous temperature monitoring is key to detecting issues early, but in overcrowded health facilitates, it can be hours between readings. To address this gap, Rice University developed the Neonatal Temperature Monitor—a simple, affordable tool to continuously monitor and display infant temperature, alerting staff of problems.   Malaria during pregnancy is dangerous for both mothers and their unborn babies. Researchers are studying whether a promising new malaria vaccine candidate—Sanaria’s PfSPZ vaccine—could offer a solution. The research team will test the vaccine in pregnant women and monitor the mothers and newborns post-birth. If successful, the project could radically change malaria management in pregnant women.   Poor water and sanitation in low-resource health facilities can expose moms and babies to infection at birth. Chlorine is a commonly used disinfectant, but supply chain issues make it hard for facilities to ensure a steady supply. PATH and MSR Global Health created an innovative, low-cost tool—the SafiStation Chlorine Generator—to produce chlorine on site using just water, salt, and electricity.     While stillbirths are common in poor regions, increasing evidence suggests that non-breathing newborns are often misidentified as stillborn when they have heart rates (HR) and could survive with resuscitation. To address this gap in care, researchers developed the NeoBeat, a low-cost, belt-like device that takes seconds to put on a baby and provides a continuous digital display of newborn HR.   Jaundice is common among newborns. Fortunately, if found and treated early it is also curable. To facilitate diagnosis and treatment in low-resource areas, innovators developed the Bilikit, a comprehensive package of low-cost tools to manage jaundice. The kit includes the Bilistick, a rapid, hand-held, portable diagnostic device, and the Bili-Hut, a portable, high-intensity phototherapy device.   Blood donation shortages in Africa can leave health workers with few options if a woman is hemorrhaging blood during childbirth. Attendants often resort to using a soup ladle and gauze to try to salvage and recycle a patient’s own blood. The Hemafuse pump by Sisu Global Health is a cost-effective, hygienic alternative. This tool sucks up blood, filters it, and transfers it to a bag for reuse.   Over 100,000 women die annually from postpartum hemorrhage (PPH) or excessive bleeding. PPH is treatable, but the tools widely used to control dosage are too costly or infrastructure intensive for low-income nations. That’s a problem Shift Labs hopes to solve with DripAssist—a low-cost, battery-powered tool that constantly monitors medicine flow via an IV drip, sounding an alarm if it fluctuates.   View as a video below: Photo credits: PATH/Doune Porter; Pumani bCPAP: 3rd Stone Design, GHTC; OptiBP: GHTC: Bilispec: Rice University, 3rd Stone Design; Neonatal Temperature Monitor: GHTC; PfSPZ vaccine: Leiden University Medical Center, GHTC; Safistation: PATH/Adam Drolet; Neobeat: Laerdal; Bilikit: GHTC, Bilimetrix srl Trieste, USAID, Little Sparrow Technologies; Hemafuse: Sisu Global Health; DripAssit: Medgadget, GHTC

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. In this regular feature on Breakthroughs, we highlight some of the most interesting reads in global health research from the past week. In the past year, outbreaks of high-fatality diseases and pathogens such as Ebola, MERS, Zika, Nipah virus, Lassa fever, and Rift Valley fever have caused at least 190 deaths and cost millions. While these outbreaks have remained relatively contained, health officials warn these diseases all have the potential to strike again and cause a global epidemic that could kill thousands, wreak economic havoc, and threaten global security the world over. According to experts, the lack of investment in research and development is contributing to this risk. The technology company Univercells has raised over US $18.8 million in series B funding to support continued development of its platform to manufacture cost-efficient biologics. This comes on the heels of positive results from a pilot program of the company’s affordable vaccine manufacturing platform. The pilot, which tested production of the Sabin inactivated polio vaccine, showed the platform could delivers 43 million doses of the vaccine per year at a cost of US $0.15 per dose—considerably lower than current versions on the market. Univercells’ backers believe these two manufacturing platforms have incredible potential to make biologics and vaccines more affordable and accessible worldwide. The World Health Organization declared in May that Nepal has eliminated trachoma as a public health problem. Trachoma, a bacterial infection that causes swollen and inverted eyelids, is the world’s leading cause of blindness with approximately 190 million people in 41 countries at risk worldwide. Nepal follows in the footsteps of Cambodia, Laos, Mexico, Morocco, Oman, and Ghana in a list of countries that have eliminated trachoma since a global campaign to eliminate the disease was launched twenty years ago. Annual administration of antibiotics in at-risk areas and improved hygiene practices have helped drive this progress. 

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. In this regular feature on Breakthroughs, we highlight some of the most interesting reads in global health research from the past week.  Spanish researchers at Madrid's October 12 Hospital are working to develop what would be the world’s first vaccine against all five strains of the Ebola virus. The research team, along with scientists at two other hospitals in Madrid, have examined blood samples taken from three people cured of Ebola in Spain. These three people produced what lead researcher, Rafael Delgado, called ‘very effective’ antibodies against the Zaire strain with which they were infected. Delgado noted researchers aim to reproduce these antibodies on a larger scale that would make them effective against all five strains of the Ebola virus. An experimental vaccine developed by Merck was administered during the outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo in May; however, it is only effective against the Zaire strain. PREDICT, a global surveillance program that aims to avert future pandemics in the human population, has discovered a new virus that infects wrinkle-lipped bats. The virus, discovered in Myanmar, is the first of its kind to be detected on a global scale and is in the same virus family as the ones that cause SARS and MERS. The research team also identified among the Myanmar bats a second new virus previously found in Thailand, conveying how diseases can easily spread globally. Although these new viruses are related to viruses that have previously caused deadly epidemics in humans, more research is required to determine if either new virus poses a threat to humans. An experiment by Australian researchers has killed 80 percent of disease-carrying mosquitoes in trial locations across north Queensland. The experiment—carried out by scientists from the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization and James Cook University, in partnership with Verily—targeted a specific type of mosquito, the Aedes aegypti mosquito, which spreads diseases such as Zika and dengue fever. Using a process called the Sterile Insect Technique, researchers bred almost 20 million mosquitoes, infecting males with bacteria that made them sterile. The sterile male mosquitos did not bite or spread disease and when they mated, the resulting eggs did not hatch causing a crash in the population. Further field trials may be held in other parts of Australia.

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. In this regular feature on Breakthroughs, we highlight some of the most interesting reads in global health research from the past week. An HIV vaccine candidate has shown promising results in human trials. A study in the Lancet found that this “mosaic” vaccine—comprised of pieces of different HIV strains—produced an anti-HIV immune system response in tests on 393 people. Further testing is required to determine if the immune response produced can prevent the HIV infection in people. In the next phase of testing, 2,600 women from southern Africa who are at risk of contracting HIV will receive the vaccine. This is one of only five HIV vaccine candidates to ever make it to this stage of efficacy trials. Paraguay has eliminated malaria, becoming the first country in the Americas to achieve this milestone in approximately a half-century, according to the World Health Organization. Public health officials have credited the national health system’s ability to quickly detect cases and determine whether they had been transmitted locally or imported as critical to Paraguay’s success. Though Paraguay has thwarted the threat of malaria for the moment, nine countries in the Americas reported at least a 20 percent increase in malaria cases between 2015 and 2016. Complacency and lack of political will in other countries in the region threaten the fight against malaria. Scientists at the California Institute for Biomedical Research are testing a new approach to tackling malaria and other insect-borne diseases using a group of veterinary drugs called isoxazolines. When administered orally to animals, isoxazolines remain in the bloodstream for up to three months, killing blood-sucking insects by damaging their nervous systems. The researchers believe isoxazolines have the potential to dramatically reduce the transmission of malaria, as any mosquito who bites a person who has taken this drug would be killed before transmitting the disease to other people. The study published by the California Institute for Biomedical Research estimates that giving 30 percent of the population isoxazolines in countries affected by malaria could prevent more than 70 percent of malaria infections. Researchers believe that isoxazolines are safe for human consumption and plan to continue to evaluate their efficacy.