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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 Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness (CEPI) announced an up-to-US$50 million investment over ten years in building the vaccine development capacity of Senegal’s Institut Pasteur. Following Africa’s major challenges in accessing COVID-19 vaccines during the pandemic, the investment aims to ensure the production of vaccines for low- and middle-income countries during future health crises, and to increase African autonomy over regional health security efforts. The first round of funding includes $15 million over three years, which will fund the development of manufacturing facilities. Last week at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos, the World Health Organization (WHO) announced plans to set up a new TB Vaccine Accelerator Council to catalyze the development of tuberculosis (TB) vaccines. In launching the plan, WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus noted the lesson learned during the pandemic that global, cross-sector commitments and partnerships can accelerate the vaccine research and development process. In addition to stressing the importance of strong TB programs and commitments from high-burden countries, the speakers at the launch event urged countries to renew their commitment toward combating TB by reinvigorating research efforts that have been historically stagnant.Also, at the meeting in Davos, Pfizer announced that it will make its entire portfolio of 500 drugs and vaccines available to 45 low-income countries at nonprofit prices. This collection of medical technologies includes patented and off-patient medicines, a range of antibiotics, as well as new vaccines and medicines as they are launched. This effort is an expansion of last year’s “An Accord for a Healthier World” initiative, which focused on a smaller number of patented products, including the COVID antiviral treatment Paxlovid. The initiative will provide more than a billion people access to important products, hopefully helping to address major global health challenges, including antimicrobial resistance which has arisen in part, due to challenges accessing a broad scope of treatments.

Neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) are a group of infectious diseases that exert a crushing burden in vulnerable communities around the world. These diseases blind, disable, and disfigure people, robbing them of health and opportunity and trapping them in poverty. While breakthroughs in recent years have brought new resources to the fight against NTDs, significant gaps remain in the arsenal of tools needed to control and eliminate these diseases. In recognition of World NTD Day on January 30, GHTC is testing our readers’ knowledge with nine questions about NTD innovation. See if you can beat our quiz below and join the fight to #BeatNTDs and #EndTheNeglect.

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 Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) last week announced US$2 million in funding for American pharmaceutical company, Tiba Biotech, which has developed promising RNA technology that could make the development of mRNA vaccines targeting Disease X (a pathogen with pandemic-potential that has yet to be identified) cheaper, more effective, and more tolerable. While mRNA vaccines for COVID-19 have successfully been administered globally, limitations including side effects and ultra-cool cold chain storage requirements hinder their effectiveness and accessibility. This first round of funding will support the development of a vaccine candidate for Japanese encephalitis. If that candidate is successful, this technology could lead to the development of a variety of Disease X vaccine candidates to be included in CEPI’s library of vaccines as part of the 100-day plan to speed up vaccine development and rollout after the emergence of a disease threat.Last week, the World Health Organization’s (WHO’s) Africa Region declared the end of the recent outbreak of Sudan ebolavirus. WHO is expected to convene Ebola experts to discuss how to move forward with the plans to trial three experimental vaccine candidates that target the Sudan strain responsible for the recent outbreak. The trial was aimed at ensuring both study groups received protection from a vaccine (one group after a time delay) and generating data about the potential of these candidates, which is much needed, as there are no approved vaccines targeting Sudan ebolavirus. Finding a new strategy for testing the vaccine candidates will be challenging because the Sudan ebolavirus is rare and with limited cases, and therefore it would be difficult to obtain enough data to prove safety and efficacy, especially for all three candidates. One potential path for continuing the trial is testing efficacy on non-human primates and then more extensive testing of safety and immune response in healthy human volunteers.Last week, the Respiratory Virus & Microbiome Initiative was launched, in collaboration with the UK Health Security Agency and funded by the Wellcome Sanger Institute. The initiative will track the evolution of a variety of respiratory pathogens including SARS-CoV-to improve viral monitoring in the UK and enhance the country’s ability to quickly identify the emergence of new viruses. There is additional hope that this work will ultimately generate much-needed knowledge about the viral families behind common diseases, as well as spur the development of vaccines and therapeutics for these viruses. This initiative comes after the COVID-19 pandemic led to viral sequencing efforts around the world that helped guide responses and detect new variants and led to the development of diagnostics and vaccines.

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 AMR Action Fund has announced its second investment, this one of $US7.5 million in European biotech company BioVerys, which is developing an antibiotic (about to enter phase 2 trials), to combat hospital-acquired pneumonia, pneumonia associated with ventilators, and blood stream infections originating from pneumonia. The investment underlines the fund’s role in filling massive gaps in the need for new antibiotics to address the growing challenge of antimicrobial resistance (AMR). The fund, which was created by several of the world’s largest drug companies, works as a venture capital fund with the goal of generating four new antibiotics over ten years. It first invested last year in two small American biotech companies also working towards therapies that can address drug-resistant infections.The Pan American Health Organization has confirmed that vaccine-derived poliovirus type 2 has been detected in wastewater samples in Canada, joining the United States, the United Kingdom and Israel as high-income countries that have detected the virus in wastewater. The Canadian National Microbiology Laboratory, which detected the virus through retrospective wastewater tests, will test archived samples from September and October 2022 through the end of February 2023 to obtain more details about the spread of the virus. This news comes as a reminder that as we enter 2023, new polioviruses, including vaccine-derived poliovirus type 2, continue to emerge around the world.In the midst of China’s severe COVID-19 outbreak, the World Health Organization’s (WHO’s) Director General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus is expressing concern about possible underreporting and underrepresenting of data, and urging the country to use all available COVID-19 vaccines, including mRNA vaccines that have been shown to be more effective than Chinese-made COVID-19 vaccines. This concern comes following the release of a report by WHO’s Technical Advisory Group on Virus Evolution that found, through working with the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, there have been no new variants circulating in the country. Full and transparent data sharing on cases, deaths, hospitalizations, and comprehensive, real-time viral sequencing are essential for WHO’s efforts to carry out risk assessments for China and around the world, as well as to understand the evolution of SARS-CoV-2 and the emergence of mutations of variants of concern.