Research Roundup: Experimental antibiotic combination, Second RSV vaccine approval, Drug-resistant TB regimen

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, a US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) advisory committee voted to recommend a monoclonal antibody product to protect children one year and under, as well as high-risk children between one and two years old, from respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV. Nirsevimab, which will be marketed as Beyfortus, was developed by AstraZeneca and will be marketed in the United States by Sanofi. The product is intended to be administered to babies via a single injection during RSV season or at birth depending on birth timing. RSV is a major challenge in children, particularly in very young children, causing up to 80,000 hospitalizations and 300 deaths a year in the United States. Pfizer’s RSV vaccine for pregnant people, which is also aimed at protecting babies, is currently being considered by regulators as well.Moderna will launch a phase 1/2 trial of their mpox vaccine this summer with the goal of generating data to inform dose selection and eventually licensure. The company announced the start of preclinical work on an mpox vaccine back in May of last year, with the vaccine being swiftly developed using the company’s mRNA platform. After the immediate mpox outbreak waned in the United States, the vaccine was deprioritized by Moderna, but ahead of this summer, when mpox is expected to re-emerge, Moderna has announced the trial and has been meeting with the US mpox response team.The Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) last week announced £1.5 million in funding for Germany’s Leipzig University, where researchers have created artificial intelligence technology that will be used to build a vaccine library aimed at streamlining the development of a new generation of vaccines against a future pathogen with pandemic potential, or Disease X. The technology will analyze the genetic structures of pathogens from ten high-risk viral families, starting with those families that include Nipah and Lassa viruses; model protein sites in the viruses that are crucial targets for generating immune responses in human; and then use those viral protein targets to develop vaccine blueprints. Future scientists will hopefully be able use the library to develop vaccine candidates within 100 days of identifying a pathogen with pandemic potential.

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. At the 76th World Health Assembly last week, World Health Organization (WHO) member states adopted a resolution on strengthening diagnostics capacity, following a recommendation from the Executive Board earlier this year. The resolution is aimed at raising global awareness of the importance of diagnostics and the major gaps in access, to even the most basic diagnostics, that are faced around the world. Implementation of the resolution will be driven by national governments, which are urged in the resolution to integrate national diagnostics strategies that address the regulation, assessment, and management of diagnostics into their national health plans, as well as to develop a national essential diagnostics list, which will hopefully lead to wider availability and access.An affordable meningitis vaccine designed to protect against multiple strains was found to be effective in phase 3 trials in Mali and the Gambia. The NmCV-5 vaccine, developed by PATH and the Serum Institute of India, generated a strong immune response against the five primary meningococcal strains in Africa, including the emerging X strain, for which there is currently no licensed vaccines. The cost of available vaccines for the four other strains of meningitis are currently too high for most African countries to buy the tens of millions of doses they need. NmCV-5 is expected to be available in the coming months and has the potential to dramatically reduce vaccine-preventable cases and deaths, especially those linked to the X strain.Using artificial intelligence, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and McMaster University have identified a new antibiotic drug to combat Acinetobacter baumannii, which is responsible for many drug-resistant infections and can lead to pneumonia and meningitis. The drug was identified using a machine-learning model that was trained to evaluate whether drug compounds would inhibit A. baumanii’s growth, which then reviewed a library of nearly 7,000 potential compounds. The finding has the potential to reduce drug-resistant infections and also highlights the potential role of artificial intelligence in accelerating the search for novel antibiotics in the face of growing antimicrobial resistance.