Research Roundup: Rotavirus vaccine receives WHO prequalification, mosquito repellent paint, and new health security partnership

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 a new report, researchers at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security highlight 15 promising technologies that could help make the world better equipped to fight emerging infectious disease (EID) outbreaks and prevent such outbreaks from becoming catastrophic events. The list includes innovative solutions from vaccines that spread through populations like viruses to 3D printed drugs. The 15 technologies identified in the report fall under five broad categories—disease detection and surveillance, diagnostics, manufacture of pharmaceuticals, administration of vaccines and drugs, and medical care—and range in use from the early detection of an EID, to preventing its spread, and through to the care of patients. Notably, researchers looked for innovations that could be used in developing countries where EID outbreaks “hit first and hit hardest,” according to Dr. Crystal Watson, lead author of the report.  A novel synthetic DNA vaccine candidate against Ebola, which targets the virus’ surface, offered complete protection from the Zaire strain of the Ebola virus in preclinical research. Importantly, the vaccine candidate also demonstrated durability, showing strong immune responses one year after the last dose—a particularly challenging area for Ebola vaccines. Compared to traditional vaccine approaches that involve injection into muscle, synthetic non-viral–based DNA vaccines can be administered directly into the skin, resulting in consistent, potent, and rapid immunity. The antibody levels resulting from this vaccine candidate were equal to or higher than those for other vaccines currently being evaluated in the clinic at the Wistar Institute Vaccine & Immunotherapy Center, where the research was conducted. One researcher noted the success of an intradermal, low-dose regimen as encouraging in the pursuit to create safe and effective vaccines that are optimized for high-risk areas. A new type of malaria vaccine, known as a transmission-blocking vaccine (TBV), which aims to prevent mosquitoes from becoming infected by malaria parasites when feeding on infected humans, could one day become part of a suite of tools used to combat malaria. While traditionally scientists have focused on developing vaccines that prevent malaria infection from developing after a person is bitten with a parasite-carrying mosquito, a TBV works differently. A TBV signals the human body to begin making anti-malaria antibodies that will be passed to the mosquito when it bites the immunized person, disrupting the transmission cycle between mosquitoes and humans. While a TBV would not directly prevent an immunized person from getting infected, it would reduce the likelihood of people in that community becoming infected. A research team supported by the PATH Malaria Vaccine Initiative, the University of Buffalo and others have shown that the TBV approach could be effective. The researchers found that antibodies from a protein called Pfs25 effectively blocked the development of malaria-causing parasites in the gut of mosquitoes in animal studies.

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. At the first-ever United Nations (UN) High-Level Meeting (HLM) on Tuberculosis (TB), member states committed to finding and treating 40 million people suffering from TB and to preventing infection in 30 million people by 2022. The political outcome declaration resulting from the HLM includes a commitment to mobilize US $13 billion for universal access to quality treatments and prevention and $2 billion for research and development (R&D) of new drugs, diagnostics, vaccines, and other tools. In addition, it highlights the need to address drug-resistant forms of TB and commits to complying with global stewardship programs in line with the UN resolution on antimicrobial resistance. An experimental vaccine, developed by GlaxoSmithKline and Aeras, reduced by half the incidence of active TB among individuals with latent TB infection in clinical trials—making it potentially the first new shot to fight the disease in over a century. Results from the Phase IIb trial of the vaccine, known as M72/AS01, show a 54 percent efficacy rate in stopping latent TB from becoming active and causing sickness. This experimental vaccine has the potential to help the estimated 1.7 billion people who have latent TB infection and are at risk of developing the disease that killed 1.6 billion people last year. The experimental vaccine will go through larger trials in the future to test its dosing schedule and to potentially target different groups that are most likely to benefit from the vaccine. A team of scientists at the Imperial College of London has developed a method of manipulating mosquito genetics to drive populations of mosquitoes toward extinction. The manipulation involves a gene drive that alters a stretch of DNA that does not vary from one mosquito to another. The altered gene disrupts a mosquito’s sexual development, making female mosquitoes infertile while forcing males to pass on the debilitating gene to all of their offspring—resulting in the population crashing over multiple generations. Results from the study in Anophele gambiae mosquitoes showed that laboratory populations of mosquitoes can become extinct within 11 generations and, according to computer models, wild populations of mosquitoes could crash in approximately 4 years. This manipulation of mosquitoes may provide a potential method of ridding the world of malaria—a disease that infected 194 million people in Africa and killed 445,000 in 2016.