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. In this regular feature on Breakthroughs, we highlight some of the most interesting reads in global health research from the past week. An old malaria compound—primaquine—and a common dye with antimalarial properties—methylene blue—have shown effectiveness in preventing malaria transmission, according to a new study published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases. Researchers found that by adding a single dose of primaquine and three doses of methylene blue to existing malaria medicines, it resulted in near complete cessation of human-to-mosquito transmission within two days. When infected with malaria-causing parasites via mosquito bite, a host may transmit the parasite back to mosquitos, which will likely cause future infection of a different host. These two compounds may aid in preventing this transmission and help curb future malaria infections. Public health experts recently met to review the latest data on chikungunya vaccine candidates and plan how to promote progress to get the candidates to market. Currently, there are 23 chikungunya vaccine candidates in the pipeline, with two vaccine candidates in phase 2 clinical trials. Researchers discussed the challenges facing developing an effective chikungunya vaccine, citing the unpredictability of where the next chikungunya outbreak could take place. Because of this, phase 3 clinical trials could prove difficult to conduct, unless the trials are conducted in non-human primates injected with human antibodies. Though more research and clinical trials are needed to bring an effective and safe chikungunya vaccine to market, experts believe these conversations will help. Recent data from Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) suggests one dose of the oral cholera vaccine is effective in delivering short-term protection against the disease. Previous research from MSF suggested the single dose cholera vaccine provides protection for those with recent exposure to the disease, but the new data—collected from the 2016 cholera outbreak in Zambia—also suggests the vaccine provides protection to those ho have not been exposed to cholera for several years. While this data further demostrates the effectivesness of the single-dose oral cholera vaccine, more research—like the effectivness of the vaccine on children under five years of age—still must be determined.

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. High levels of antibiotic resistance are present in both high- and low-income countries, according to surveillance data from the new World Health Organization’s (WHO) Global Antimicrobial Resistance Surveillance System (GLASS), which tracked suspected bacterial infections among 22 countries. Across different nations, GLASS found that patients with resistance to at least one of the common antibiotics for blood infections ranged from 0–82 percent. Patients with resistance to penicillin—the most common antibiotic used to treat pneumonia—ranged from 0–51 percent and patients with resistance to ciprofloxacin—a common antibiotic used to treat E. coli associated with urinary tract infections—ranged from 8–65 percent. This data suggests antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is not only a threat to low-resource communities around the world, but also to highly developed areas. WHO hopes the survey will provide a more complete picture of AMR patterns and trends so individual nations and the global community develop and monitor interventions to combat this growing problem. Wellcome Trust has set up a new information-sharing effort—the Surveillance and Epidemiology of Drug-Resistant Infections Consortium (SEDRIC)—designed to help countries track, analyze, and share information about antimicrobial resistance (AMR). SEDRIC will connect experts from around the world to identify gaps in AMR surveillance, improve coordination, and help nations strengthen their data collection capacity. It will also look at ways technology can improve understanding of how pathogens before resistant and how infections spread. The effort will build on the work of the World Health Organization’s Global Antimicrobial Resistance Surveillance System by helping countries builder strong surveillance networks. Pharmaceutical company Sanofi Pasteur has asked the European Medicines Agency (EMA) to review an experimental sleeping sickness medicine developed in partnership with the Drugs for Neglected Diseases initiative. The medicine is a clinically studied, ten-day oral treatment to combat sleeping sickness, a fatal disease endemic to Africa. EMA accepted the request to review under Article 58 and will eventually provide a scientific opinion in cooperation with WHO. This approval is a critical step toward registering the medicine for future use in endemic areas of Africa.