Research Roundup: Contraceptive jewelry may be new family planning option, microneedle technology receives green light, and aspirin to fight TB

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 pursuit of a malaria vaccine, the biotech firm, Sanaria, has partnered with roboticists at Johns Hopkins University to develop a guillotine to decapitate and dissect out the salivary glands of mosquitoes, which hold the malaria-causing parasite. This guillotine, which can decapitate 30 mosquitoes at a time with the guidance of a “mosquito surgeon,” will help Sanaria effectively mass-produce its malaria vaccine candidate, PfSPZ, which requires one whole malaria parasite per vaccine dose. Eventually automating this process, even partially, would likely boost the mosquito dissection rate above the current average of 300 mosquitoes per hour achieved by highly trained technicians. The PfSPZ vaccine, which is currently in phase 2 clinical trials, is thought to work by inducing killer T cells to attack the parasites in the human body as they’re developing in the liver. Scientists at Oxford University have harvested antibodies from volunteers vaccinated in research trials of an Ebola vaccine to develop a treatment for the viral infection. Traditionally, antibodies intended for treatment are collected from the blood of people who have survived infection. This technique instead uses antibodies collected from those who have been exposed to the Ebola vaccine but not the Ebola virus itself—suggesting that protective therapies can be developed from people who are disease-free. To create the experimental treatment, scientists made a cocktail of four antibodies from trial volunteers who had been given an experimental Ebola vaccine and whose immune system responded to the shot by making antibodies. This cocktail successfully cured six guinea pigs of the virus when administered three days after infection. The research team believes this approach could be used for other emerging diseases caused by viruses. Brazilian researchers say they have developed a simpler, cheaper, and faster method to diagnose the Zika virus that doesn’t require laboratory equipment or trained staff. The method uses a technology called loop-mediated isothermal amplification (RT-Lamp), which amplifies the viral genome of the biological sample to detect the virus. While the current method of detecting Zika virus, polymerase chain reaction (PCR), is considered the gold standard for virus detection, it requires expensive equipment, specialist staff, and laboratories with good infrastructure. On the other hand, RT-Lamp has the ability to detect a very low quantity of the virus and has an individual cost of around US$0.25 compared to $10 for the PCR test. The RT-Lamp technology has long been used for other diseases, such as Ebola, but not for Zika. The authors of the study have requested a patent of this technique and hope to transform the technology into a commercial kit to be used for diagnosing patients.

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. Tuberculosis (TB) could be eliminated by 2045 if investments against the disease are increased to US$10 billion a year, according to a panel of experts from the Lancet Commission on TB. The commission has laid out a roadmap for ending TB by investing in a range of actions including research and development (R&D), targeted prevention, and improved diagnostics. It calls for TB R&D investments to be increased from the current amount of $772 million a year to at least $2 billion a year over the next four years and estimates that for every dollar spent on TB R&D there will be an estimated $16-82 return on investment. The commission launched its report six months after the United Nations High-Level Meeting on TB to provide guidance on translating member state commitments into action and investments to eliminate the disease. The Global AMR [antimicrobial resistance] Research and Development Hub, announced during Germany’s G20 presidency in 2017 and launched at last year’s World Health Assembly, is now taking shape in Berlin. Fully financed by the German government for an initial three years as part of a $556 million 10-year pledge to address AMR, the hub was conceived as a way to help align national and international initiatives on AMR and use data to inform the research agenda. The secretariat’s initial focus is creating a dashboard to map existing R&D activities worldwide to produce information and point to gaps to guide policymakers in making investment decisions. Given the influence this mapping could have on research priorities, external advocates are pushing to ensure the hub’s activities reflect the needs of low- and middle-income countries who are not often at the forefront of setting the global AMR agenda. The US Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) has awarded a two-year, $10 million contract to a US biotech firm to support the development of a vaccine against Marburg, a hemorrhagic virus that has caused a number of deadly outbreaks in Africa and is considered a potential bioterror threat by the US government. The contract with Public Health Vaccines will support advancement of a promising vaccine candidate now in pre-clinical development. If the research shows the vaccine to be feasible, BARDA has the option to provide up to $72 million in additional funding to support the vaccine candidate through a phase 2 clinical trial and begin development of an additional vaccine candidate against the Sudan Ebola virus, a closely-related virus.