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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 Neglected Tropical Diseases (NTDs) Day last week, the Global Health Innovative Technology (GHIT) Fund announced that it is investing $12.7 million across eight projects to further the development of new technologies to help address NTDs and a range of other diseases. Specifically, the funding aims to further the development of new diagnostics and drugs for leishmaniasis, dengue, malaria, Lassa fever, Rift Valley fever, Ebola, and Marburg, which is being led by various global product development partnerships and companies, including Medicines for Malaria Venture, PATH, and the Drugs for Neglected Diseases initiative.   Newly published research led by the global collaborative endTB project found three new safe and effective drug regimens to treat tuberculosis (TB) resistant to rifampin, the most effective first-line TB antibiotic currently available. These findings help expand the toolkit of treatments for patients with drug-resistant TB in the face of rising resistance globally, offering regimens that are shorter, less toxic, and do not require injections compared to currently available options. The new regimens use two drugs, bedaquiline and delamanid, which have been in use for just over a decade, in combination with older medications. The trial, launched in 2017, involved hundreds of patients across seven countries, including populations often excluded from clinical trials: children, people infected with HIV or hepatitis C, and women who became pregnant while on treatment, ensuring these groups are not excluded from new treatment recommendations.A recently published study found that a prophylactic antibody-based immune therapy protected monkeys against severe disease caused by H5N1 avian influenza, as the outbreak in the United States continues to cause concern. The broadly neutralizing antibody targets a relatively stable region of the virus and is therefore less prone to losing its efficacy than antibodies targeting viral structures that are prone to mutate, helping to ensure that the protection conferred by the therapy can withstand the possible emergence of virus variants. If proven successful in further studies, the therapy could be used to prevent severe disease in at-risk populations and protect first responders and other health care providers in the early stages of an outbreak, and more broadly, this research helps set the stage for the development of medical countermeasures in the case of future outbreaks of influenza.

GHTC's statement on Agenda item 22: Climate and Health at the World Health Organization's (WHO's) Executive Board (EB) meeting.Climate change undermines global health security, and we applaud WHO’s resolution and new Global Action Plan on Climate and Health to address these risks. WHO’s drafted plan accounts for the important role that research will play in addressing climate change, including through regional research capacity-building. We especially applaud the document’s call for member states to promote research and development (R&D) to prevent, detect, treat, and respond to climate-sensitive diseases and health outcomes.  However, while the draft includes several strong R&D provisions, it mentions the threat of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) only once. AMR is poised to cause 10 million annual deaths by 2050, and likely more with the growing influence of rising temperatures and evolving zoonotic diseases. Highlighting AMR as a global health threat inextricably linked to climate change and developing actionable guidance will be crucial for holistic and successful global action. With this in mind, we strongly suggest WHO and member states take the following actions: 1. WHO and member states should align the global action plan with last year's World Health Assembly resolution to accelerate global efforts to address antimicrobial resistance. In particular, we urge both WHO and member states to establish a global AMR laboratory network to strengthen worldwide AMR diagnostic capacity. 2. We urge WHO to work jointly with member states to strengthen resilience and adaptation to climate change through increased investments to develop new treatments that keep pace with resistance. We encourage member state investment in R&D to pioneer innovative health technologies, including prioritizing the expansion of access to health tools for those in vulnerable geographies and for the populations most impacted by AMR. 3. We encourage countries to accelerate the development and implementation of national action plans for AMR surveillance and response in addition to prioritizing a comprehensive One Health approach that appraises the needs of those most burdened by AMR. We call on WHO to continue supporting the development, revision, and implementation of AMR national action plans on a routine basis and facilitating regional- and cross-country-level collaboration and integration of national action plans.  

GHTC's statement on Agenda item 14: Global Strategy for Women’s, Children’s and Adolescents’ Health at the World Health Organization's (WHO's) Executive Board (EB) meeting.Although the Global Strategy for Women’s, Children’s and Adolescents’ Health has been instrumental in guiding global efforts, countries must scale up their implementation of high-impact interventions. The Director General’s report highlights that malaria continues to be one of the leading causes of under-five mortality, draws attention to the “severe drug drought” in maternal health, and underscores the continued inequalities when it comes to access to quality care. While not highlighted by the report, we also know that newborns in the first 28 days of their lives are especially vulnerable to drug-resistant infections, with staggering rates of morbidity and disability directly attributable to antimicrobial resistance (AMR). More broadly, one out of every five deaths due to AMR is in children, with 99.7 percent of those deaths occurring in low- and middle-income countries.With only five years to 2030, and many countries being off track to reach the targets of the Sustainable Development Goals related to maternal, newborn, and child mortality, we recommend that countries and WHO take the following actions:1. We call on member states to step up action to coordinate and increase investments in health technologies for women, scale up access to preventive tools and treatments, and include pregnant and lactating women in research and clinical trials to improve data quality and availability of therapeutics. As gaps in therapeutic options persist for pregnant and breastfeeding women, countries must prioritize efforts to accelerate the investigation, development, and introduction of better medicines for this population. 2. We urge member states to make investments in malaria research and innovation that include underserved populations, including children and pregnant and lactating women, given the many adverse health outcomes of malaria in pregnancy for both mother and baby, including on early childhood development.3. We welcome the efforts of the Global Accelerator for Paediatric Formulations Network, or GAP-f, and call on all countries and WHO to support its ongoing work, including facilitating the research and development of priority products on WHO’s Paediatric Antiretroviral Drug Optimization list. 4. We call on greater focus and alignment between this strategy and the Global Action Plan for AMR and urge WHO and member states to facilitate access to antibiotics and other treatment options for children. More research and development to combat drug-resistant infections is urgently needed. 

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. Last week, the Combating Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria Biopharmaceutical Accelerator (CARB-X) announced that it is awarding $729,000 to Immunartes to develop a monoclonal antibody designed to prevent infections caused by Staphylococcus aureus, a leading cause of bloodstream infections that is responsible for more than 1 million deaths every year. Methicillin-resistant S. aureus, or MRSA, is of particular concern; it is one of the five leading contributors to deaths from antimicrobial resistance. The antibody is designed to neutralize the bacterium’s abilities to evade the immune system and, if successful, could be a promising solution to protect high-risk populations from infection.  A recent study has suggested it might be feasible to develop a vaccine offering lifelong protection against the Nipah virus, one of the world’s deadliest pathogens for which there are no vaccines. The research team tracked 25 survivors from the original 1998 outbreak in humans of the virus in southern Malaysia, finding that 72 percent of the survivors still had detectable levels of virus-neutralizing antibodies in their blood that could help protect them from being infected again. These results suggest that there is an enduring immune response to the virus, and they can be used to ensure that the candidate vaccines in development are targeting the correct parts of the virus, as well as to help develop monoclonal antibodies to treat Nipah infections. The Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations is funding two promising vaccine candidates for Nipah virus, which have completed Phase 1 trials.A new European Union project called Comparative Signature of Marburg Virus Cell Activation as a Blueprint for the Identification of Antiviral Targets against Newly Emerging Viruses, or COMBINE, aims to better our understanding of how viruses enter cells to create tools that will improve our ability to combat emerging infectious diseases, as viral disease emergence is expected to accelerate in the coming years. The project will use the Marburg virus as a model to create a blueprint for identifying new targets for antiviral strategies. This blueprint will be used to establish the preclinical basis for the continued development of drugs and vaccines for Marburg and also to develop an innovative, experimental pipeline of countermeasures that can be rapidly applied to other emerging viruses, strengthening global readiness for future outbreaks of pathogens with pandemic potential.