Research Roundup: WHO launches digital EML, coronavirus vaccine ready for testing, and coronavirus treatment study underway

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 new all-oral drug combination of bedaquiline, pretomanid, and linezolid cures 90 percent of people with deadly drug-resistant tuberculosis (TB) if given for six months, according to clinical trial results reported in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM).Typically, this high of a success rate is only seen when TB responds to conventional therapy. When TB is resistant, the success rate falls to well below 50 percent and averages just 14 percent in South Africa, where the trial was conducted by TB Alliance. Current therapy for drug-resistant TB requires taking up to seven drugs, which cause many side effects, for at least 18 months. The new regimen takes just six months, has fewer side effects, and is less costly. TB kills an estimated 1.5 million people annually and of the 10 million new cases each year, roughly 500,000 are drug resistant. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation have paid for 15,000 drug molecules to be shipped to the Rega Institute for Medical Research, outside of Brussels, to be tested as a potential cure to the novel coronavirus. The samples are all active ingredients in current antiviral treatments which will be rapidly screened to determine whether they have an inhibiting effect on a sample from the first Belgian patient to be diagnosed. They expect to complete the screening in a week or two. The Gates Foundation has said it will provide up to US$100 million to improve detection, isolation, and treatment efforts in response to the coronavirus outbreak. Though there are currently no proven treatments for coronavirus, a few drug trials are already underway. As of last Wednesday, more than 93,000 people had been infected in more than 80 countries and the global death toll was 3,190. Results from two phase 3 clinical trials reported in the NEJM suggest that a monthly shot of the antiretroviral (ART) drugs cabotegravir and rilpivirine work just as well as daily pills to suppress the viral load of HIV in the bloodstream. ART therapy can effectively halt the replication of the virus and nearly eliminate it from the bloodstream, prolonging life expectancy. If approved by regulators, this long-acting combination therapy could be a more convenient treatment for people living with HIV than the conventional treatment regimen of two or more pills per day, which experts say can pose adherence challenges for many. There is currently no cure for HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.

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.  Five African countries have become the first to license Merck’s highly effective Ebola vaccine, rVSV-ZEBOV-GP. This means the vaccine can now be administered in those countries—including the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Burundi, Ghana, Zambia, and Guinea— without being subject to clinical trial or research protocols. Three months ago, the World Health Organization (WHO) prequalified rVSV-ZEBOV-GP when it announced that the vaccine met quality, safety, and efficiency standards—paving the way for African countries to start their own regulatory processes. rVSV-ZEBOV-GP was first used in the 2015 Ebola outbreak and later in the current ongoing outbreak under a “compassionate use” research protocol, where it was found to be more than 97 percent effective. Last week, Sanofi Pasteur announced it would partner with the US Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) to develop a vaccine for the novel coronavirus, COVID-19. Sanofi’s previous work to develop a vaccine for SARS, another coronavirus, could give the company a head start on other drug-makers racing to develop a vaccine against COVID-19. With BARDA funding, Sanofi plans to develop a bank of vaccine candidates and produce pilot lots for testing. No decisions have been made about later-stage funding. Sanofi expects to have a vaccine candidate to test in the lab within six months, which could be ready for human trials within a year to 18 months. Sanofi is the second major vaccine maker, along with Janssen (Johnson & Johnson), to announce it will try to develop a vaccine against COVID-19, which has reportedly infected more than 70,000 people, mostly in China. Other small biotechs are also working on candidates. The Zambia National Public Health Institute and FIND have launched a new platform that enables data-driven decision-making to tackle antimicrobial resistance (AMR). The platform, Zambia One Health Surveillance System, captures reliable AMR data from across sectors, including human and animal health, in a unified and harmonized data management system. Prior to this platform, Zambia lacked a systematic approach for the collection, collation, and analysis of AMR data to inform an effective response to the rising threat of AMR. According to WHO, AMR is a global public threat that could lead to over ten million deaths per year by 2050.