Research Roundup: HIV vaccine candidate fails, R&D for infectious diseases reaches record high, and study documents first case of coronavirus spread by asymptomatic person

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.  A vaccine candidate for gestational malaria, known as PRIMVAC, has yielded promising results in a small clinical trial evaluating its safety and effectiveness. PRIMVAC was shown to be well-tolerated and to elicit an immune response in 100 percent of the 68 non-pregnant women vaccinated after only two injections and for up to 15 months after the initial vaccination. Malaria is particularly dangerous to pregnant women because the red blood cells infected with the Plasmodium falciparum parasite that causes malaria accumulate in the placenta, promoting anemia and gestational hypertension. Gestational malaria is also linked to a higher risk of spontaneous abortion, premature birth, and intrauterine growth delays leading to low birth weight and a high rate of neonatal mortality. Future clinical trials will focus on studying the immune response elicited by PRIMVAC longer term. Last Tuesday, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued an emergency use authorization of a diagnostic test for the novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) that has emerged in China, sickening more than 20,000 people and killing 427 globally. This exemption will make the test—developed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)—available to public health labs across the United States and around the world in an effort to contain the disease’s spread. CDC has already shipped the test to a repository where states and international partners can order it. The nonprofit Foundation for Innovative New Diagnostics (FIND)—which works to expand diagnostic capacity in low-resource countries—is now using viral isolates of 2019-nCoV to evaluate the CDC’s diagnostic test and others like it. Scientists at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research (WRAIR) have shown for the first time that a single dose of an experimental Zika vaccine, ZPIV, in individuals previously infected by dengue can boost pre-existing immunity and elicit antibody responses against both Zika and dengue. This result was compared to trial volunteers with no prior exposure to dengue who required two vaccinations of ZPIV to reach a similar magnitude of Zika antibody responses. These findings indicate that an effective Zika vaccine could boost dengue virus immunity and generate Zika antibodies that have the potential to be a prevention tool in regions where both diseases are endemic. In three phase 1 human clinical trials the ZPIV vaccine, developed by WRAIR, has shown to be safe and well-tolerated in healthy adults and to induce a robust immune response.

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.  GlaxoSmithKline has licensed a promising tuberculosis (TB) vaccine candidate to the Bill & Melinda Gates Medical Research Institute in an effort to advance this vaccine for use in low- and middle-income countries. The institute will lead further development of the vaccine candidate and sponsor future clinical tests. The vaccine candidate, developed in collaboration with IAVI, was shown in mid-stage testing to be effective in approximately half of the people who were vaccinated for as long as three years. The only licensed TB vaccine that currently exists—called Bacillus Calmette-Guerin—prevents severe disease in infants and young children but gives limited protection to adolescents and adults. TB infects about 10 million people annually, killing about 1.5 million.A new research group at the National Institutes for Health (NIH) tasked with conducting human trials for vaccines against emerging health threats will be testing the first of likely many experimental vaccine candidates against the novel coronavirus that emerged in Wuhan China late last year. They hope to have a vaccine ready to test in just three months’ time. Chinese scientists quickly identified the genetic sequence and posted it publicly, allowing scientists to begin vaccine development without waiting for a sample of the virus. NIH scientists are now working with US biotech Moderna Inc. to develop an RNA-based vaccine, while additional candidates are in development by other funders and companies. According to Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Anthony Fauci, three months from gene sequence to initial human testing would be the fastest the agency has ever gotten such a vaccine off the ground. As of Friday, Reuters reports more than 800 people in China have been infected with the new coronavirus and 26 have been killed. Cases have also been confirmed in Thailand, Vietnam, Singapore, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Nepal, and the United States.According to a report by the Access to Medicine Foundation, the world is “precariously reliant” on a small number of pharmaceutical companies to develop new antibiotics, running the risk of a rise in superbugs. The biennial Antibiotic Resistance Benchmark report, which looks at pharmaceutical companies’ efforts to tackle antimicrobial resistance, found that only a core group of eight drug firms are developing antibiotics and that the pipeline of new products is very small. This report echoes a warning from the World Health Organization last week that a lack of private investment and innovation in the development of new antibiotics is undermining efforts to combat drug-resistant infections. Drug-resistant infections are predicted to kill 10 million people annually by 2050 if drug resistance continues to grow at its current rate—meaning that, increasingly, the treatments we rely on to kill infections are not working, and new ones are needed.