Research Roundup: Two malaria drugs power to limit transmission and the latest on chikungunya and cholera vaccines

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 this regular feature on Breakthroughs, we highlight some of the most interesting reads in global health research from the past week. Using a new research platform that extracts DNA directly from soil, researchers at Rockefeller University have discovered a new class of antibiotics. Scientists have long seen soil as a potential untapped source for new antibiotics; however, tapping this resource has proved challenging because only about 1 percent of bacterial species in soil can be cultured in labs. This new discovery platform is culture-independent. It allows scientists to extract, clone, and sequence DNA from the soil without growing bacteria in the lab. Researchers are hopeful this new platform can be scaled to systematically search for new antibiotics in the environment. With recent advances in gene therapy techniques, researchers are looking at the potential of these techniques to improve treatment for those living with AIDS and cure the disease. Scientists have used gene-editing tools to cut DNA at the exact spot to disable the HIV entryway gene both in immune T cells and blood stem cells. While the results of these initial experiments were less promising than researchers had hoped, there was a silver lining: Patients saw a decrease in the number of cells where the HIV virus lurked in a dormant state. Thus, researchers are looking at the potential to pair altered cells with existing antiretroviral medicines to improve the body’s ability to eliminate the virus. Scientists are also looking at the potential to use gene editing to introduce new genes that would help T cells recognize and kill HIV, similar to therapy introduced last year to treat cancer. Aeras announced resultsfrom an innovative clinical trial that provides new encouraging evidence that tuberculosis (TB) vaccines could prevent sustained infections in high-risk adolescents. A prevention-of-infection phase 2 trial in South Africa demonstrated that revaccination with the Bacille Calmette-Guerin vaccine significantly reduced sustain TB infections in adolescents. Another experimental vaccine candidate, H4:IC31, also reduced sustained infections, although not at statistically significant levels. However, these results mark the first time a subunit vaccine has shown any indication of ability to protect against TB infection or disease in humans.

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 this regular feature on Breakthroughs, we highlight some of the most interesting reads in global health research from the past week. High levels of antibiotic resistance are present in both high- and low-income countries, according to surveillance data from the new World Health Organization’s (WHO) Global Antimicrobial Resistance Surveillance System (GLASS), which tracked suspected bacterial infections among 22 countries. Across different nations, GLASS found that patients with resistance to at least one of the common antibiotics for blood infections ranged from 0–82 percent. Patients with resistance to penicillin—the most common antibiotic used to treat pneumonia—ranged from 0–51 percent and patients with resistance to ciprofloxacin—a common antibiotic used to treat E. coli associated with urinary tract infections—ranged from 8–65 percent. This data suggests antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is not only a threat to low-resource communities around the world, but also to highly developed areas. WHO hopes the survey will provide a more complete picture of AMR patterns and trends so individual nations and the global community develop and monitor interventions to combat this growing problem. Wellcome Trust has set up a new information-sharing effort—the Surveillance and Epidemiology of Drug-Resistant Infections Consortium (SEDRIC)—designed to help countries track, analyze, and share information about antimicrobial resistance (AMR). SEDRIC will connect experts from around the world to identify gaps in AMR surveillance, improve coordination, and help nations strengthen their data collection capacity. It will also look at ways technology can improve understanding of how pathogens before resistant and how infections spread. The effort will build on the work of the World Health Organization’s Global Antimicrobial Resistance Surveillance System by helping countries builder strong surveillance networks. Pharmaceutical company Sanofi Pasteur has asked the European Medicines Agency (EMA) to review an experimental sleeping sickness medicine developed in partnership with the Drugs for Neglected Diseases initiative. The medicine is a clinically studied, ten-day oral treatment to combat sleeping sickness, a fatal disease endemic to Africa. EMA accepted the request to review under Article 58 and will eventually provide a scientific opinion in cooperation with WHO. This approval is a critical step toward registering the medicine for future use in endemic areas of Africa.