Research Roundup: New work in malaria and HIV diagnostics and a widespread immunization campaign in Brazil

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. Scientists have created a new process to detect tuberculosis (TB) by introducing a molecule to the bacteria’s outer layer that illuminates under fluorescent light. This innovation could help make sputum microscopy tests easier to perform, improving the accuracy and speed at which patients with TB are diagnosed and treated. While there are other staining methods in use, this molecule—DMN-trehalose—is actually incorporated by the TB bacteria as it builds up its outer protective layer, thus this method illuminates only living TB bacteria, unlike other stains which reveal both live and dead bacteria. This makes it easier for health professionals to diagnose TB and monitor a patient’s response to treatment over time. Researchers at the University of California, San Francisco discovered new mechanisms by which HIV hides in infected cells, remaining in a latent mode that evades the body’s immune system and antiviral drugs. When the HIV virus infects immune cells, most cells start producing more of the virus, but a fraction of the cells become dormant. Current therapies are not able to kills these dormant cells, which can then reawaken and cause a resurgence of the virus in patients. To understand this progression better, researchers used a panel of tests to study the process by which these dormant, infected cells convert viral DNA to RNA and discovered that these latent cells stall out at various stages, marking their dormant status. Helping the dormant cells finish making RNA will wake them up, allowing the body to recognize and kill the infected cells with assistance from common antivirals. These findings could help scientists understand and develop new treatments to target and address the issue of latent HIV infection. Researchers in the Netherlands are undertaking an unusual approach to vaccine research, infecting 17 volunteers with parasitic worms as part of a new vaccine study for the potentially fatal disease schistosomiasis. Each volunteer agreed to have 20 male parasitic worms—worms that will be unable to reproduce or lay eggs—injected into their arms with the intent to be monitored for 12 weeks following infection. After 12 weeks, volunteers will receive a drug to kill the remaining worms. Researchers hope this study will show it is possible to test vaccines with this method, which is faster and more affordable than field research, which can take months or even years to run and complete.

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. Using a new research platform that extracts DNA directly from soil, researchers at Rockefeller University have discovered a new class of antibiotics. Scientists have long seen soil as a potential untapped source for new antibiotics; however, tapping this resource has proved challenging because only about 1 percent of bacterial species in soil can be cultured in labs. This new discovery platform is culture-independent. It allows scientists to extract, clone, and sequence DNA from the soil without growing bacteria in the lab. Researchers are hopeful this new platform can be scaled to systematically search for new antibiotics in the environment. With recent advances in gene therapy techniques, researchers are looking at the potential of these techniques to improve treatment for those living with AIDS and cure the disease. Scientists have used gene-editing tools to cut DNA at the exact spot to disable the HIV entryway gene both in immune T cells and blood stem cells. While the results of these initial experiments were less promising than researchers had hoped, there was a silver lining: Patients saw a decrease in the number of cells where the HIV virus lurked in a dormant state. Thus, researchers are looking at the potential to pair altered cells with existing antiretroviral medicines to improve the body’s ability to eliminate the virus. Scientists are also looking at the potential to use gene editing to introduce new genes that would help T cells recognize and kill HIV, similar to therapy introduced last year to treat cancer. Aeras announced resultsfrom an innovative clinical trial that provides new encouraging evidence that tuberculosis (TB) vaccines could prevent sustained infections in high-risk adolescents. A prevention-of-infection phase 2 trial in South Africa demonstrated that revaccination with the Bacille Calmette-Guerin vaccine significantly reduced sustain TB infections in adolescents. Another experimental vaccine candidate, H4:IC31, also reduced sustained infections, although not at statistically significant levels. However, these results mark the first time a subunit vaccine has shown any indication of ability to protect against TB infection or disease in humans.