Research Roundup: WHO unveils online resource to guide neglected disease R&D, major funding announcements for snakebite research, and TB Alliance awarded grants to develop TB drug candidates

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. World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus announced at the 72nd World Health Assembly that a WHO Foundation would be set up later this year. The foundation, which was first mentioned at the 144th Executive Board Meeting in January, aims to broaden the organization’s donor base and “enable us to generate funding from previously untapped sources,” said Dr. Tedros. Details about the proposed foundation’s structure, governance, operating model, and legal status are still being hashed out. According to WHO officials, the foundation would be totally independent of WHO—no longer requiring the approval of the World Health Assembly—but could potentially be linked by contract to WHO to help fundraise for the organization from the general public and high net worth individuals. WHO aims to raise US$14.1 billion between 2019-2023 to deliver on its triple-billion targets. On Wednesday, WHO officially declared Algeria and Argentina free of malaria. Algeria, the country where malaria was first discovered, is now the third African country—following Mauritius in 1973 and Morocco in 2010—to eliminate the disease, which kills more than 400,000 people annually. Argentina is the second country in the Americas, after Paraguay, in 45 years to eliminate the disease. Despite WHO declaring 38 countries malaria-free since 1955, progress against the disease has stalled as malaria-carrying mosquitoes have become resistant to certain drugs used to treat the disease and insecticides used in bednets that protect people from being bitten while sleeping. Researchers at McMaster University have developed an affordable, durable method of transporting temperature-sensitive vaccines to low-resource settings that is inspired by breath strips. The solution: mixing dried vaccines with two sugar powders used to create the dissolvable film structure of breath strips. By using this technique, vaccines can stay stable at temperatures up to 40 degrees Celsius for up to three months. This approach circumvents the need to maintain a “cold chain” during transport from supplier to patient—a task which poses logistical and financial challenges in the hot climates of developing countries where infectious disease threats are endemic. Water or saline can be added to dissolve the sugary combination, and the same reconstituted liquid can be used for injections or nasal sprays. The researchers have tested the approach in lab experiments, but not people, and are pursuing funding to refine and deploy the technology.

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 report released by the Economist Intelligence Unit warns that the fight against drug-resistant tuberculosis (DR-TB) lags behind that of other diseases in terms of money and public attention. Deaths from DR-TB will cost the world economy nearly US$20 billion annually; however, international funding for TB is approximately one-eighth that of HIV and AIDS and about half that of malaria. The report calls for TB to be treated as a public health emergency and states that $9 billion is needed by 2020 to develop new drugs, diagnostics, and vaccines to address this disease—the world’s number one infectious disease killer. DR-TB can develop when patients fail to adhere to the notoriously grueling treatment regimen, which includes thousands of pills and painful injections, or because of poor-quality drugs. Last year, the United Nations held the first-ever High-Level Meeting on TB, determining that ending TB is a global priority after progress against the disease has stalled in recent years. The World Health Organization (WHO) announced plans last Tuesday to change its vaccination strategy in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) in an attempt to better confront the country’s current Ebola outbreak, which has lasted nine months and claimed more than 1,000 lives. As part of the new vaccination strategy, WHO intends to launch “pop-up” vaccination campaigns in safe communities and shift to immunizing as many people in each target area as possible instead of relying solely on its current tactic of ring vaccinating health workers and the immediate contacts of each known case. To extend vaccine supplies, WHO also recommended offering smaller doses of the vaccine—developed by Merck—to those at high risk and low risk respectively, and eventually introducing a second vaccine made by Johnson and Johnson. A consortium, including the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, is planning how to safely roll out the new vaccine. On Wednesday, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) released two new draft documents which provide guidance about how to study drug safety and efficacy in pregnant and lactating women. The draft documents provide insight to drug makers into the FDA’s thinking on when they should study a medicine in lactating women and how they can better monitor health outcomes in pregnant women who are taking medications that have already been FDA-approved. These documents follow 2018 recommendations made by a federal task force formed by Congress to study the lack of research involving pregnant and lactating women. Historically, the drug industry has excluded pregnant women from research out of concern that an experimental medication might harm a fetus. There is a similarly small amount of research on medications safety in lactating women. Once finalized, the documents will help companies collect more high-quality safety information about drugs used in pregnant and lactating women.