Research Roundup: New Zika blood test, TB vaccine shows sustained protection, first Lassa fever vaccine set for trial by year's end

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.Scientists have identified a new strain of HIV for the first time in 19 years. This strain is part of the Group M version of the HIV-1 virus—the same family of subtypes responsible for the global HIV pandemic—and is the first new Group M HIV strain to be identified since the guidelines for classifying subtypes were established in 2000. Knowing which virus strains are circulating ensures that diagnostic tests used to detect the disease are effective and provides scientists with a more complete picture of how HIV evolves. Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, noted there was no need for panic as current treatments for HIV are effective against this strain and others. According to the World Health Organization, approximately 36.7 million people in the world are living with HIV, and UNAIDS estimates that in 2016 1.8 million people became newly infected with the virus. Takeda Pharmaceuticals reported preliminary results from a late-stage study evaluating the effectiveness of its dengue vaccine candidate, which showed promising but mixed results. In the study which tested two doses of the vaccine in more than 19,000 children in eight countries, the vaccine demonstrated an overall effectiveness rate of 80.2 percent against all four strains of dengue virus. In one strain, known as DENV-2, the effectiveness rate was 97.7 percent but the effectiveness rates in two other strains, DENV-1 and DENV-3, were much lower at 73.7 percent and 62.6 percent respectively. There was not enough data to assess the effectiveness of the vaccine against the fourth strain of the virus. Experts note that before final safety and efficacy determinations can be made about the vaccine, longer term safety data is required, especially among children who were not previously infected with dengue virus—an issue that has hampered rival pharmaceutical company Sanofi’s Dengvaxia vaccine. In a pilot program in Zanzibar, an island off the coast of Tanzania, drones are being tested to deploy a new tool to help fight malaria. The drones will spray rice paddies, which are typical breeding grounds for malaria-transmitting mosquitoes, with Aquatain, a non-toxic, silicon-based liquid gel that creates a thin film on top of the water that traps and kills mosquito larvae and pupae by preventing them from breathing at the water surface. After the trial in Zanzibar, researchers plan to publish their findings in peer-reviewed journals and hope to expand their approach across the African continent. According to the United Nations, malaria kills a young child every minute and causes 75 percent of all deaths under the age of five.

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. On World Polio Day last week, the World Health Organization officially declared that type three poliovirus has been eradicated—making it the second of the three strains of the virus to be wiped out. Naturally-occurring cases of the last remaining virus strain, type one, are now limited to Afghanistan and Pakistan with a total of just 33 new cases last year. Though much progress has been made toward eradicating this disease, the number of confirmed cases this year has risen to 88 in those two countries as violence and mistrust have hindered vaccination campaigns. Cases caused by the vaccine itself have also thwarted eradication efforts. The National Institutes of Health and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation will jointly invest US$200 million over the next four years to develop genetic-based cures for sickle cell disease and HIV. Both partners have vowed that the cures will be both affordable and available in low-resource countries hit hardest by the two diseases, particularly in Africa. This partnership reflects growing concerns that scientific advances such as gene therapies and genome-editing are prohibitively expensive and therefore out of reach to most patients. This collaboration aims to move gene-based therapies into clinical trials in the United States and countries in sub-Saharan Africa within the next seven to ten years and eventually make treatments for sickle cell disease and HIV available in the hardest hit areas. After a two-day meeting in Okayama, Japan, health ministers of the world’s twenty largest economies issued a declaration endorsing the rapid achievement of universal health coverage (UHC), more effective support of healthy ageing, increased attention to health emergencies and their causes, and more forceful action on antimicrobial resistance. The G20 Health Ministers Declaration goes well beyond the general commitments made by G20 leaders to advance global health goals after their two-day meeting back in June. As part of the commitment to UHC, the health ministers recognized the importance of access to medicines and vaccination and reaffirmed pledges to end HIV, tuberculosis, and malaria, among other measures.