Breakthroughs Blog: Vaccines

In this guest post, Angeline Nanni—director of Market Access at Aeras—reflects on World Immunization Week. Through the heroic efforts of infant and childhood global vaccination programs, childhood diseases that once caused millions of deaths across the globe have been thwarted. Hope has overshadowed fear as preventive vaccines help the healthy to remain free from deadly diseases and allow whole communities to thrive. In honor of World Immunization Week, we applaud those at national health departments, the Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, United Nations Children’s Fund, the World Health Organization, and others whose dedication, expertise, and political will have led to ambitious and successful immunization campaigns. Remarkable results of global and national vaccination campaigns and programs have led to: Smallpox eradication. Polio endemic in only three countries as opposed to 125 countries 25 years ago. Measles deaths worldwide reduced by 78 percent between 2000 and 2007. Additionally, estimates show that an additional 1 million children’s lives will be saved every year with the accelerated introduction of vaccines against pneumococcal disease and rotavirus. The MenAfriVac® vaccine is expected to prevent 437,000 cases of meningitis over the next 10 years, saving 43,500 lives and approximately $570 million. Significant progress is being made in research and development efforts for new vaccines against TB. Credit: PATH/Evelyn Hockstein Immunization has saved the lives of more children than any other medical intervention in the last 50 years. However, one in five children still do not have access to these lifesaving vaccines. The majority of these children lives in the poorest countries and regions of the world, and faces the highest risk of exposure to life-threatening, vaccine-preventable diseases like measles and meningitis. We must make a concerted effort to ensure that vaccines are available and accessible to all who need them, as laid out in the Global Vaccine Action Plan. This Plan, which was endorsed by the World Health Assembly in 2012, provides a framework for achieving the vision of delivering universal access to immunizations for all people, at affordable and sustainable prices. While many generations in developed countries have benefited from vaccines, newer generations have never experienced the death and devastation caused by vaccine-preventable diseases. This has led to complacency, skepticism, and misinformation about the safety and value of vaccines. We cannot let this undo the tremendous gains that have been achieved through vaccines. We cannot go back to a world where children die, families are devastated, and communities are vulnerable to diseases that could be prevented by routine and safe vaccinations. The extraordinary success of vaccines in saving millions of lives and improving health throughout the world has the potential to protect millions more from other deadly infectious diseases, like tuberculosis (TB). The deadly combination of TB and HIV and increasing rates of drug-resistance are making this disease more difficult to diagnose and treat, and more deadly. There has been important progress in developing new drugs and diagnostics, but TB will remain a global threat without new, more effective vaccines. Prevention through vaccination would be the most cost-effective tool to mitigate these global epidemics. Recent economic and health impact modeling demonstrates that a 60 percent efficacious adolescent and adult preventive TB vaccine, delivered to a mere 20 percent of the population, could potentially avert as many as 40-60 million new cases of TB over the course of 26 years and would be cost-effective. A significantly improved infant vaccine could potentially avert 5-10 million cases of TB over that same time period. Significant progress is being made in research and development efforts for new vaccines against TB. To date, more than 16 TB vaccine candidates have been tested in human clinical trials, and scientists are doing basic research to discover effective correlates of protection for TB vaccines. As researchers continue developing TB vaccine candidates and moving them through preclinical and clinical studies, we are simultaneously working on early access strategies to maximize public health impact and be better prepared to accelerate vaccine delivery to reach those hardest hit by the TB epidemic. Vaccines have made the world a vastly different place by reducing the incidence of disease, providing freedom from worry and fear of the death and disability that they cause. Vaccines hold the key to a healthier and wealthier world for all of us. This week we recognize the success of critical vaccine implementation efforts. We support more scale-up of these implementation efforts, the goal of universal coverage, and the research and development of new vaccines to prevent even more disease and deaths. We look forward to the day when TB is also added to the list.

In this guest post, Jamie Rosen—media and communications manager at Aeras—writes about a new film series that features personal stories of people affected by tuberculosis (TB) worldwide, and the urgent need to develop new vaccines and other tools against the disease. Aeras is excited to share the trailer for a series of short films exposing the underreported global epidemic of TB and the movement for innovation to improve our tools to fight it. In the TB community, as in other areas of global health, we are constantly seeking ways to help people comprehend the scale and the individual tragedy of this disease, to understand the difficulties of treating it, and to inspire people to do what it takes to adequately address it. Aeras has been working with filmmaker Mo Scarpelli and her crew over the past several months to produce four films. Each film will focus on the story of one individual interspersed with expert interviews, and will feature footage from five countries around the world. The first film will focus on an American multi-drug resistant TB survivor; the second on an Indian TB doctor; the third on a South African woman who volunteered for a clinical trial; and the fourth on a British researcher working to develop new TB vaccines. Aeras is grateful for the advice and participation of many people who are working tirelessly to take care of today’s TB patients and foster hope for a better future—one with more effective diagnostics, drugs and ultimately vaccines against this rapidly evolving disease. If this trailer inspires you, please go to www.aeras.org and spread the word. For more information or to organize a screening, please contact Jamie Rosen at jrosen@aeras.org.

In this regular feature on Breakthroughs, we highlight some of the most interesting reads in global health research from the past week. Cipla and the Drugs for Neglected Diseases initiative recently announced that their malaria drug has been prequalified by the World Health Organization, an important step toward its roll-out across Asia. A new report from the Kaiser Family Foundation provides a comprehensive look at the Department of Defense's role in global health, including the department’s research and product development efforts. The US Food and Drug Administration has awarded GHTC member Aeras a grant worth $299,525 to spur the development of new vaccines against tuberculosis. A new study finds that the way medical research is funded in the United States has been vastly altered over the last 20 years by advocates asking that research be focused on particular diseases. A widespread vaccination campaign to protect 50 million people against meningitis with a new vaccine has been launched in seven African countries, health officials said Thursday.

In this guest post, Margaret McGlynn, president & CEO of the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative (IAVI), writes about a new partnership between IAVI and the Indian government. The post originally appeared on the US Agency for International Development’s (USAID) Impact blog. When you’re dealing with a global public health crisis, having an international presence isn’t just advisable—it is imperative. This applies as much to the development of new tools to prevent disease as it does to treatment. An AIDS vaccine candidate, for example, must be tested in the people who will eventually use it and against the strains of HIV it is devised to protect them from. That’s why (IAVI), in partnership with USAID, has worked diligently over the past several years to establish itself as a truly global nonprofit partner. Using donor funds, IAVI has created an enviable network of research centers in sub-Saharan Africa dedicated to assessing novel AIDS vaccine candidates in clinical trials and conducting supporting epidemiological studies on HIV. These partnerships have made meaningful contributions to the research capacity of many developing countries—a capability that is now helping local researchers tackle other diseases. IAVI and its partners are now applying that same model to support the design of a new generation of AIDS vaccine candidates. Today, IAVI and the Translational Health Sciences and Technology Institute (THSTI), an autonomous institute of the Indian government’s Department of Biotechnology (DBT), launched an HIV Vaccine Design Program near New Delhi. The program is dedicated to the large-scale generation and preclinical evaluation of immunogens, the active ingredients of vaccines. It will focus on devising immunogens capable of eliciting antibodies that can prevent infection by a broad range of the circulating genetic variants of HIV. That challenge, known to researchers as the neutralizing antibody problem, has long stymied progress toward an AIDS vaccine. But recent discoveries of antibodies capable of blocking a number of HIV variants have provided researchers with clues to the design of potentially powerful new vaccine candidates. The HIV Vaccine Design Program will use these insights to develop new methods to generate large numbers of potential HIV immunogens and rapidly assess their potential for use in candidate vaccines. Much of the work will take place in a laboratory housed within THSTI that is being built and staffed with support from IAVI, DBT, and THSTI. The program’s location is no accident. Over the past decade, IAVI has enjoyed a productive partnership for the clinical evaluation of candidate AIDS vaccines with key medical research institutions of the Indian government. Indian scientists have also actively participated in an international consortium of HIV laboratories supported by IAVI to advance HIV vaccine research. The government of India, meanwhile, is in the early phase of its “Decade of Innovation,” a policy that seeks to harness a growing roster of home-grown biotechnology companies, the nation’s deep pool of scientific talent, and global research partnerships to boost innovation in a variety of high-tech fields. The HIV Vaccine Design Program provides an opportunity to engage an emerging economy in the global quest to develop a vaccine against HIV. For India, it creates an opportunity to address a crisis of significant relevance to Indians. As importantly, it seeds the kinds of collaborations that often foster scientific and technical innovation and generate ideas that might be applied to address other diseases that have long hampered development.