News

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.