Research Roundup: RSV vaccine recommendations, Drug-resistant Shigella cases, HIV prevention options

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.PANTHER, a newly launched pan-African platform for emergency research and preparedness, aims to address the lack of clinical trials carried out on the continent, despite it facing a disproportionate amount of the global disease burden. The researchers behind the initiative see the platform as a way to ensure essential data is captured in clinical trials during active outbreaks of existing or newly emerging diseases, especially following the recent Marburg and Sudan ebolavirus outbreaks. PANTHER hopes to prepare around 80 percent of the groundwork for trials before an outbreak by targeting at-risk spots, creating a network of researchers and health care providers, and proactively engaging funders so that when an outbreak is identified, this foundation can be quickly leveraged to adapt trials to local contexts and specific disease characteristics.Last week, researchers announced promising results from a phase 1 clinical trial, supported by the US National Institutes of Health, looking at a temperature-stable tuberculosis (TB) vaccine that can be freeze-dried and safely stored at higher temperatures for months. The shot, given to 45 healthy adults in the study, was found safe, well-tolerated, and elicited measurable responses in the body. If further testing of the vaccine proves successful, the shot could be a clear alternative to the bacille Calmette-Guerin vaccine—the only licensed vaccine for TB, which is more sensitive and cannot be frozen— and break down barriers to vaccine distribution in low-income and low-resource settings around the world.A new paper found that more than 10 percent of people in rural Myanmar have been exposed to a diverse range of sarbecoviruses, a group of coronaviruses that includes Sars and Sars-Cov-2. Researchers also emphasized that the paper confirmed the risk of direct spillover from bats, especially in remote, rural areas. While there were no signs of human-to-human transmission of these viruses, the findings highlight the ongoing occurrence of spillovers and the need for surveillance of both disease outbreaks and rural areas with high wildlife-human interface, as well as ensuring strong biosecurity laboratory measures are in place.

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.The University of Minnesota’s Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy last week announced the launch of a roadmap outlining a detailed strategy for the development of broadly protective and widely suitable vaccines to address future COVID-19 variants and other coronaviruses. The roadmap lays out the need for five broad and intersectional streams of work from virology to financing that will be necessary to break down the siloes of current vaccine development to achieve better coordination, accountability, and access. The initiative comes as a response to the COVID-19 pandemic, which is the third time in two decades that a coronavirus has become a public health crisis.A man in Germany has become at least the third person living with HIV formally declared HIV-free after undergoing a procedure in 2013 to replace his cancerous bone marrow cells with donor stem cells that contained a mutation making them effectively HIV-resistant. There remain questions about the full effects of the transplant and the factors behind the successful elimination of HIV in the body, even after follow-up studies. Experts say it is unlikely this procedure would ever be rolled out widely in people without leukemia due to high risk of a person rejecting donor marrow, but other ongoing and planned studies are looking at the potential of genetically modifying a patient’s own stem cells to include the HIV-resistant mutation.The United States is seeing a concerning rise in cases of syphilis, which has seen various cycles of rises and declines over the past century. There are few researchers that study syphilis, and the development of new diagnostics, treatments, and preventive tools has proved challenging because of past inability to grow the fragile Treponema pallidum bacterium that causes the disease in a lab and because of the virus’s ability to evolve resistance to antibiotics. A new technique that allows for lab-grown bacteria along with recent, promising studies of treatments and diagnostics for the disease provide hope. However, there is wide agreement that a vaccine is needed to eliminate the disease and the potential of resistance, and researchers are far from introducing a potential candidate.