Research Roundup: Lack of R&D to combat AMR, first diagnostic for new virus from China, and WHO's urgent global health challenges for the decade

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.  GlaxoSmithKline has licensed a promising tuberculosis (TB) vaccine candidate to the Bill & Melinda Gates Medical Research Institute in an effort to advance this vaccine for use in low- and middle-income countries. The institute will lead further development of the vaccine candidate and sponsor future clinical tests. The vaccine candidate, developed in collaboration with IAVI, was shown in mid-stage testing to be effective in approximately half of the people who were vaccinated for as long as three years. The only licensed TB vaccine that currently exists—called Bacillus Calmette-Guerin—prevents severe disease in infants and young children but gives limited protection to adolescents and adults. TB infects about 10 million people annually, killing about 1.5 million.A new research group at the National Institutes for Health (NIH) tasked with conducting human trials for vaccines against emerging health threats will be testing the first of likely many experimental vaccine candidates against the novel coronavirus that emerged in Wuhan China late last year. They hope to have a vaccine ready to test in just three months’ time. Chinese scientists quickly identified the genetic sequence and posted it publicly, allowing scientists to begin vaccine development without waiting for a sample of the virus. NIH scientists are now working with US biotech Moderna Inc. to develop an RNA-based vaccine, while additional candidates are in development by other funders and companies. According to Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Anthony Fauci, three months from gene sequence to initial human testing would be the fastest the agency has ever gotten such a vaccine off the ground. As of Friday, Reuters reports more than 800 people in China have been infected with the new coronavirus and 26 have been killed. Cases have also been confirmed in Thailand, Vietnam, Singapore, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Nepal, and the United States.According to a report by the Access to Medicine Foundation, the world is “precariously reliant” on a small number of pharmaceutical companies to develop new antibiotics, running the risk of a rise in superbugs. The biennial Antibiotic Resistance Benchmark report, which looks at pharmaceutical companies’ efforts to tackle antimicrobial resistance, found that only a core group of eight drug firms are developing antibiotics and that the pipeline of new products is very small. This report echoes a warning from the World Health Organization last week that a lack of private investment and innovation in the development of new antibiotics is undermining efforts to combat drug-resistant infections. Drug-resistant infections are predicted to kill 10 million people annually by 2050 if drug resistance continues to grow at its current rate—meaning that, increasingly, the treatments we rely on to kill infections are not working, and new ones are 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, Chinese authorities confirmed that a previously unidentified lung infection that affected 59 people in the city of Wuhan in December is a novel coronavirus—a member of a family of viruses that jump from animals to humans. To date, only six coronaviruses have ever been identified in humans, so the emergence of a new one may be cause for concern. Coronaviruses are fairly common and cause upper respiratory tract illnesses with mild to moderate symptoms, such as colds and coughs. However, two coronaviruses have proven to be particularly deadly— severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS). The major focus of Chinese authorities will be to identify how easily the virus is transmitted from person to person, though right now it does not yet appear to be easily spreading. Information on the new virus in China is limited as preliminary tests have only been carried out on 15 patients.Scientists at Oxford University and the Royal Botanic Kew Gardens have developed a smartphone app to detect and differentiate disease-carrying mosquitoes using the acoustic signature of their flight tone. The app, Humbug, records the time and location at which the insect was identified, along with the mosquito flight tone and uploads the data to a central server where the species is identified using a suite of algorithms. This new technology provides researchers the ability to quickly upload, analyze, and share large amounts of data showing where mosquitoes can be found—a historically difficult process that requires trained mosquito experts to trap the insects and evaluate them under microscopes to identify the species. Thus, some countries have only a handful of samples measuring the prevalence of mosquitoes. Once mosquito distribution has been measured, this data can be compared with rainfall and temperature patterns to allow researchers to study and predict what causes the insect to spread and multiply. Humbug is currently being trialed in Tanzania and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.For the first time, primate research shows that a single dose of an antibody-based treatment can prevent HIV transmission from mother to child; however, timing of the dose is key. A study evaluating rhesus macaque monkey newborns found that they did not develop the monkey form of HIV, SHIV, after receiving a combination of two antibodies 30 hours after being exposed to the virus. In comparison, delayed treatment until 48 hours after exposure to the virus resulted in half of the baby macaques developing SHIV when they were given four smaller doses of the same antibody cocktail. The study also found that newborns who received antiretroviral therapy (ART) remained SHIV-free when they started a three-week regimen of that therapy 48 hours after exposure—suggesting a much shorter course of ART given after exposure could prevent transmission. Next, researchers plan to see if different antibodies, or a combination of antibodies and ART, could be even more effective in preventing HIV transmission from mother to child, and also aim to determine if the antibodies actually eliminate HIV or only prevent it from replicating.