Breakthroughs Blog: Antimicrobial resistance

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. More newborn babies with sepsis are dying because their infections are not responding to the usual antibiotics, according to the largest global study on the subject to date. The study, sponsored by the Global Antibiotic Research and Development Partnership (GARDP), which enrolled 3,200 newborns diagnosed with sepsis in 11 countries, found that 11 percent of newborns died over the course of the study and that 15 percent were prescribed last-line antibiotics due to the high degree of resistance to standard recommended antibiotics in treatment units. Antibiotic resistance is now one of the major threats to newborn health globally, according to researchers, with virtually no studies underway to develop novel antibiotic treatments for babies with sepsis caused by multidrug-resistant infections. GARDP is now designing an interventional trial to identify better treatment regimens to combat rising resistance.World Health Organization (WHO) member states reached a preliminary agreement this week to gradually increase mandatory fees, or “assessed contributions,” to cover 50 percent of the organization’s core budget needs. WHO currently relies heavily on voluntary contributions and private donors, which can leave its financing inflexible and unpredictable. The new funding reforms would be contingent upon certain conditions, such as increased transparency, with the funding linked to a member state review of WHO progress on promised internal reforms. The agreement will still need to be formally approved by governments at the World Health Assembly in May to take effect.COVID-19 diagnostic testing has fallen by 70–90 percent around the world, making it increasingly difficult to monitor the pandemic’s evolution, treat patients, and track variants, according to FIND, a co-convener of the Access to COVID-19 Tools Accelerator diagnostics pillar. While reported cases and deaths are declining globally, changes in testing strategies and reductions in the number of tests being used globally means there is little confidence in actual case trends. The testing decline also undermines the ability to treat patients with new therapeutics—like Pfizer’s antiviral Paxlovid, which requires early diagnosis to get the most benefit—and has led to a decrease in the number of genomic sequences submitted to global databases, which helps track emerging variants.

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.The Medicines Patent Pool (MPP) has signed agreements with 27 generic manufacturing companies to produce and supply the oral COVID-19 antiviral molnupiravir for 105 low- and middle-income countries. The sublicense agreements follow a voluntary licensing agreement signed by MPP and Merck, Sharp & Dohme—which developed the drug—in October to facilitate global access of the COVID-19 treatment. The nonexclusive licenses allow generic manufacturers to produce the raw ingredients and finished drug itself: five companies will focus on producing the raw ingredients, thirteen companies will produce both raw ingredients and the finished drug, and nine companies will produce only the finished drug. Molnupiravir has not yet been approved by the World Health Organization (WHO), a step often regarded as a precursor to the negotiation of manufacturing licenses by a United Nations-supported group like MPP.Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) poses a significant threat to humanity, as it has become a leading cause of death worldwide killing about 3,500 people every day, according to a new study published in The Lancet last week. More than 1.2 million people—and potentially millions more—died in 2019 as a direct result of antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections. The analysis, which covered more than 200 countries and territories, is the most comprehensive estimate to date of the global impact of AMR, which has caused common infections to become untreatable. The report highlights an urgent need to scale up action to combat AMR and outlines immediate actions policymakers can take to help save lives and protect health systems, including optimizing the use of existing antibiotics, taking greater action to monitor and control infections, and providing more funding to develop new antibiotics and treatments.The COVAX vaccine-sharing facility has delivered 1 billion COVID-19 vaccine doses, across 144 countries, as of last weekend. The program, which was initiated in 2020 with the goal of delivering 2 billion doses by the end of 2021, began delivering vaccines in February 2021 but hit several setbacks throughout the year, including vaccine hoarding by high-income countries and export restrictions which limited vaccine supply. Shipments increased exponentially in the last quarter of 2021, but vaccine inequity remains high, according to the latest WHO data showing 67 percent of the population in richer nations have been fully vaccinated, compared with only 5 percent in poorer nations. More than 40 percent of the world's population has yet to receive a first dose. Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, has launched a renewed call for COVAX funding to help reach WHO's goal of vaccinating 70 percent of the populations in poorer countries by July.

Prior to COVID-19, tuberculosis (TB), another airborne disease, was the world’s leading global infectious disease killer, claiming the lives of around 1.5 million people annually. Insufficient and inadequate tools and treatments, as well as the growth of drug resistance, have challenged global efforts to bring this epidemic to an end. But scientists hope that tide will turn as more new technologies and innovations advance to market. In recognition of #WorldTBDay, test your knowledge of innovations to #EndTB with GHTC’s quiz below: Loading... (function(i, s, o, g, r, a, m) { var ql = document.querySelectorAll('A[quiz],DIV[quiz],A[data-quiz],DIV[data-quiz]'); if (ql) { if (ql.length) { for (var k = 0; k

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.  The new all-oral drug combination of bedaquiline, pretomanid, and linezolid cures 90 percent of people with deadly drug-resistant tuberculosis (TB) if given for six months, according to clinical trial results reported in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM).Typically, this high of a success rate is only seen when TB responds to conventional therapy. When TB is resistant, the success rate falls to well below 50 percent and averages just 14 percent in South Africa, where the trial was conducted by TB Alliance. Current therapy for drug-resistant TB requires taking up to seven drugs, which cause many side effects, for at least 18 months. The new regimen takes just six months, has fewer side effects, and is less costly. TB kills an estimated 1.5 million people annually and of the 10 million new cases each year, roughly 500,000 are drug resistant. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation have paid for 15,000 drug molecules to be shipped to the Rega Institute for Medical Research, outside of Brussels, to be tested as a potential cure to the novel coronavirus. The samples are all active ingredients in current antiviral treatments which will be rapidly screened to determine whether they have an inhibiting effect on a sample from the first Belgian patient to be diagnosed. They expect to complete the screening in a week or two. The Gates Foundation has said it will provide up to US$100 million to improve detection, isolation, and treatment efforts in response to the coronavirus outbreak. Though there are currently no proven treatments for coronavirus, a few drug trials are already underway. As of last Wednesday, more than 93,000 people had been infected in more than 80 countries and the global death toll was 3,190. Results from two phase 3 clinical trials reported in the NEJM suggest that a monthly shot of the antiretroviral (ART) drugs cabotegravir and rilpivirine work just as well as daily pills to suppress the viral load of HIV in the bloodstream. ART therapy can effectively halt the replication of the virus and nearly eliminate it from the bloodstream, prolonging life expectancy. If approved by regulators, this long-acting combination therapy could be a more convenient treatment for people living with HIV than the conventional treatment regimen of two or more pills per day, which experts say can pose adherence challenges for many. There is currently no cure for HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.