Breakthroughs Blog: Tuberculosis

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, Moderna announced that its new booster shot targeted at the omicron subvariant of COVID-19 raises immune protection against subvariants by increasing levels of omicron-blocking antibodies up to 15 times pre-booster levels. Moderna also said that an early analysis showed that while the antibodies generated by the booster were less effective against the rapidly growing BQ.1.1 subvariant, they could still block it. This announcement follows similar positive findings that were released by Pfizer and BioNTech earlier this month about their own bivalent coronavirus vaccine booster. However, Novavax also recently released results showing that their bivalent booster did not show a stronger response than their original booster.Last week, an analysis done by researchers from TB Alliance, Stop TB Partnership, and the World Health Organization estimated that the BPaLM/BPaL treatment regimen for drug-resistant tuberculosis (DR-TB) could save governments up to US$740 million a year. Implementation of the all-oral, shorter regimen is estimated to be 40 to 90 percent less expensive than current drug regimens for DR-TB, when accounting for drug costs, healthcare costs, and patient-incurred costs. The cost savings from the new regimen coupled with the shorter time period and the fewer drugs that are easier to tolerate, BPaLM/BPaL could contribute to more people with DR-TB having access to treatment and improved treatment experiences.Last week, the World Health Organization (WHO) announced that WHO and the Ugandan government are planning to test three candidate Ebola vaccines in a clinical trial with the intent to help address the ongoing outbreak in the country. The first doses are expected to arrive this week, although it is unclear when exactly the trial will start. The vaccines being used in the trial include one produced by IAVI, one developed by the Sabin Vaccine Institute, and a final developed by the Jenner institute at the University of Oxford. While there have been questions about the usefulness of the trial if it concludes after the outbreak ends, the results of the trials could provide essential information that will help prevent future Sudan Ebolavirus outbreaks even if it concludes after the current outbreak. Additionally, the trial design will enable all participants to receive a vaccine (though some will receive it after a delay) as opposed to a standard randomized controlled trial in which one group gets a placebo.

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 Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) announced plans for a US$1.76 million investment to advance and expand the scope and technology of the Spillover app, a platform created at the University of California, Davis that could be key to identifying and preparing for “Disease X,” a virus with pandemic potential that has yet to be identified. The platform includes a database with more than 500,000 samples from an estimated 74,000 animals in 28 different countries around the world, and CEPI’s investments will further its capabilities to identify viruses that are most likely to spill over to humans. The platform is hoping to use that data to prioritize and streamline investments in a library of vaccines, aimed at protecting against the viral families that pose the greatest threats, that are ready to be adapted against “Disease X” within 100 days of its identification.South Africa will begin piloting a new every-other-month HIV prevention shot as new modelling released last week showed that the shot could prevent as many as 52,000 new infections over the next 20 years if rolled out nationally. The pilot will begin after approval from the South African Health Products Regulatory Authority, which is expected early next year. Two large clinical trials found that the shot was more effective than the oral HIV prevention pill, Truvada, in part because it is taken much less frequently than the daily pill. However, the shot will only be available, at least in the short-term, in small pilot projects, and the high price is still a major barrier to the product being cost-effective in South Africa.Results from the STREAM clinical trial, shared last week at the Union World Conference at Lung Health showed that two shorter treatment regimens for multi-drug resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) including a fully oral nine-month bedaquiline-based regimen and a six-month injection-containing regimen have been shown to be safer and more effective that the nine-month regimen, which combines pills and injections, that is still in wide use. The STREAM trial was the largest-ever MDR-TB trial ever conducted with more than 1,000 participants across eight countries. The findings from the trial strengthen the evidence for bedaquiline as a component of improved drug-resistant therapies (bedaquiline is also a component of the six-month BPaL and BPaLM regimens, which were endorsed for use against most forms of drug-resistant tuberculosis in the World Health Organization's rapid communication on tuberculosis treatment guidelines released earlier this year).

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.While the COVID-19 pandemic has led to serious setbacks in progress against tuberculosis (TB) with mortality now rising again after a slow but steady decline before the pandemic, COVID-19 has also demonstrated the feasibility of large-scale investment into the rapid development of urgently needed technologies when political will and a sense of urgency exists. Researchers were working on developing new tests, drugs, and vaccines for TB before the pandemic, including one vaccine candidate currently in advanced clinical trials that was developed by GSK and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Now, powerful technologies that were employed in the development of vaccines for COVID-19, like messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA), are starting to be employed against TB, with BioNTech and Pfizer planning trials of an mRNA TB vaccine in the next few months.The World Health Organization (WHO) has published its first-ever list of fungal priority pathogens in response to the expanding geographic range of dangerous fungi due to climate change, the rise in cases of fungal disease during the COVID-19 pandemic, and the growth in resistance of fungal diseases to treatments. The list includes 19 pathogens that have been identified as posing the greatest threat to human health. The goal of publishing the list is to catalyze funding for research into fungal infections, which receives less than 1.5 percent of all funding for infectious diseases, as well as to encourage improvements to the treatment guidelines for these infections.The University of Minnesota’s Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy (CIDRAP) recently published a draft of a Coronavirus Vaccines Research and Development Roadmap, a project supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and The Rockefeller Foundation, for public review and comment. The roadmap, which builds on lessons learned from the development of successful COVID-19 vaccines, identifies strategies to develop effective vaccines for new COVID-19 variants as well as coronaviruses that have yet to emerge. In particular, the roadmap emphasizes the need for durable, broadly protective vaccines that are simple to deliver and that protect against multiple coronaviruses.