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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 World Health Organization’s (WHO) new Science Division unveiled a Health Product Profile Directory—an online resource to guide the research and development of new technologies to combat neglected diseases and other health threats, including antimicrobial resistance and diseases that pose a pandemic threat. The Health Product Profile Directory is a free, searchable database of target product profiles for needed health products to tackle the world’s most pressing global health issues. Each product profile outlines eight to ten key characteristics for development of various health products, including vaccines, medicines, and diagnostics. The directory currently contains 196 product profiles developed by 24 agencies, 91 of which are focused on infectious diseases. In this editorial piece, Dr. Madhukar Pai also discusses whether the product profiles should address affordability, the opportunity to leverage the directory to tap into the potential of emerging innovators in the Global South, and ways to improve the new WHO resource. Every year, 5.4 million people are bitten by snakes. Between 81,000 and 138,000 die as a result, and of those who survive, 400,000 suffer lifechanging injuries. Two years ago, WHO formally classified snakebite as a neglected tropical disease and later this month it will launch a global strategy aimed at halving the number of deaths and cases of disability caused by snakebite by 2030. Last week, two major funding announcements for snakebite research were made public. Wellcome Trust announced a new £80 million program to transform the way snakebite is managed globally, and the UK Department for International Development (DFID) released £9 million to fund the development of a universal snake antivenom. The DFID-funded consortium—which includes the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative, the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, and snakebite specialists from Kenya, Nigeria, the United States, and India—will leverage the technology and processes that led to the discovery of drugs to combat HIV to develop new antivenom therapies. It will run through 2021, when a pre-clinical prototype of antivenom is expected. TB Alliance was awarded a Center of Excellence in Translational Research grant by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases to support the development of two new clinical stage tuberculosis (TB) drug candidates. The grant, spaced out over five years, will provide US$5.5 million in the first year and reach a total of $28.4 million by 2024. With this grant, TB Alliance and its research partners will focus on the development of compounds that address drug-sensitive and multidrug-resistant strains of TB. “Expanding the global portfolio of new TB drug candidates, from which we can assemble tomorrow’s shorter and simpler cures, is crucial in the fight against TB,” said Dr. Mel Spigelman, president and CEO of TB Alliance.

WASHINGTON, DC—Next week’s World Health Assembly will be setting priorities that have enormous life-altering implications for billions of people around the world. The Global Health Technologies Coalition (GHTC) is calling on World Health Organization (WHO) member states to increase investments in research and development (R&D), as new tools and technologies are essential for meeting urgent challenges, from achieving universal health coverage (UHC) to fighting antimicrobial resistance (AMR), including drug-resistant tuberculosis (DR-TB), and emerging threats like Ebola.R&D is essential for delivering on the promise of UHC. We still lack many of the tools needed to combat major health challenges facing the world’s poorest and to achieve global goals to drastically reduce maternal, newborn and child mortality, end the epidemics of HIV/AIDS, TB and malaria, and eliminate neglected tropical diseases. Attaining all these goals will require new investments that deliver a range of innovations and insights, as well as efforts to strengthen the overall health system in multiple areas, including clinical trial capacity, laboratory systems and regulatory frameworks. That’s why it is critical to elevate R&D as a central pillar to achieving UHC.There is an urgent need to mobilize new R&D investments and enhance coordination to combat AMR, which could erase decades of medical progress. Growing drug-resistance is reinvigorating leading killers of children like tuberculosis, pneumonia, malaria, typhoid and diarrheal diseases, in addition to spurring deadly hospital-based infections. We currently lack tools needed to fight back, which is why R&D must be a central focus of the battle against AMR. We need new antimicrobials, as well as better diagnostics to detect drug-resistant infections and vaccines to prevent them. One of the biggest drivers of the global AMR challenge is DR-TB. The WHO and member states must support efforts to develop new TB drugs, diagnostics and vaccines, and deliver on the global commitments made at the United Nations High-Level Meeting on TB: to diagnose and treat 40 million people by 2022 and close the US$1.3 billion gap in annual funding for TB R&D. Finally, we need to intensify global efforts to develop new tools to prevent health emergencies. The recent re-emergence of Ebola in the Democratic Republic of Congo highlights the critical importance of developing drug and vaccine candidates, diagnostics and mobilizing additional tools, like mobile laboratories, well in advance of an outbreak. We will continue to struggle to contain Ebola, or an outbreak of a disease not yet on our radar, without sustained, coordinated investments that deliver the tools needed to ensure the next outbreak does not become a global crisis. WHO should also expand its Essential Diagnostic List to include platform technologies to help us better prepare to respond to the next “Disease X.” ###FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASECONTACT:   Katy Lenard, klenard@burness.com, +1 301-280-5719