Julien Rashid

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.Several recent news articles have claimed that new strains of COVID-19 have appeared that are more virulent or transmissible. These claims, however, should be highly scrutinized. Though some forms of COVID-19 with specific mutations have spread more widely, this is more likely due to chance and the movement and interactions of their human hosts, rather than evolutionary changes impacting the virus’s transmissibility or virulence.The National Institute of Health (NIH) launched a longitudinal study this week to investigate the impact of COVID-19 on children. The study will enroll 6,000 children from 2,000 families in 11 cities across the United States. Since only a fraction of COVID-19 patients to-date have been children, the study aims to assess whether children are more resistant or less likely to develop symptoms from SARS-CoV-2 infection. It will also investigate whether people with asthma or allergies are more resistant to COVID-19. Researchers will collect bi-weekly nasal swabs and questionnaire data on social distancing practices and potential exposures. For family members that indicate potential infection, researchers will collect blood and stool samples.The COVID-19 pandemic has caused labs across the country to shutter, disrupting countless research programs and threatening the careers of young academics. In particular, researchers' work that requires long start-up times—such as when animals are involved—could be set back by months or even years. This is especially worrisome for early-career academics who were planning to finish their graduate programs or who are losing critical work that would have laid the foundation for future projects.

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.On Wednesday the National Institutes of Health (NIH) launched the Rapid Acceleration of Diagnostics (RADx) initiative, a US$1.5 billion effort to develop new diagnostic technologies for COVID-19 in partnership with the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA). As part of RADx, NIH will host a $500 million challenge seeking promising proposals for point-of-care and at-home diagnostic tests. "We need all innovators, from the basement to the boardroom, to come together to advance diagnostic technologies, no matter where they are in development," said NIH Director Francis Collins. Finalists who are awarded funding will be paired with technical, business, and manufacturing experts to complete develop their products.The NIH National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and Gilead announced hopeful results from separate clinical trials of Gilead's drug remdesivir, the broad-spectrum antiviral initially developed by Gilead to treat the Ebola and Marburg viruses, against COVID-19. According to NIAID, the drug compared to a placebo reduced median time to recovery from 15 to 11 days, and results suggest the drug had a small positive effect on survival rate. These results aren’t game-changing, but in combination with results reported from a separate trial run by Gilead with similar outcomes, were enough for FDA to grant an emergency use authorization for remdesivir last Friday.The Trump Administration is reportedly planning ways to drastically accelerate the development of a SARS-CoV-2 vaccine through a program called Operation Warp Speed. The program will convene pharmaceutical companies, government agencies, and the military with the audacious goal of cutting the development timeline of a vaccine by as much as 8 months and producing 300 million vaccine doses by the end of 2020. Through Operation Warp Speed the government will absorb the cost of evaluating several vaccine candidates simultaneously, first in animal models, then in one large human master protocol trial that will evaluate several candidates concurrently. After filtering the pipeline, top candidates will enter late-stage clinical trials while the government invests in advanced construction of manufacturing facilities to ramp up mass production of the vaccines before knowing if they are safe and effective.The Jenner Institute, a nonprofit vaccine developer based at Oxford University, has leaped ahead in the race to develop a SARS-CoV-2 vaccine. According to The New York Times, the Institute, having already shown in previous trials that similar inoculations are safe, plans to enroll 6,000 people in a clinical trial by the end of next month to test the vaccine’s efficacy, putting it ahead of other vaccine trials. Pending emergency approval from regulators, the developer say they could have several million doses available by September. The technology in use has been in development at the Jenner Institute for decades in attempts to create a malaria vaccine.

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 the largest study yet of the malaria drug hydroxychloroquine’s effect on patients with COVID-19, there was a higher rate of deaths among those being treated with hydroxychloroquine and hydroxychloroquine plus the antibiotic azithromycin than those who received standard care. The study was a retrospective analysis of treatments for 368 patients rather than a rigorous, randomized controlled trial. It’s also important to note that patients who were treated with the drug were those who were the most sick. Yet, the study raises further questions about this treatment that has been widely used during the pandemic and promoted by President Trump. Reflecting on these findings, a panel of experts from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) released new COVID-19 treatment guidelines that specifically caution against the use of hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine, with and without azithromycin, outside of clinical trials.Dr. Rick Bright has been transferred from his position as director of the Biomedical Advanced Research Authority (BARDA)—a key agency involved in developing COVID-19 medical countermeasures—for a more narrowly focused position at NIH, just as BARDA has received supplemental funding more than ten times larger than its base funding of US $562 million to support coronavirus product development. Dr. Bright is asserting he was removed from his position because he pressed for rigorous vetting of hydroxychloroquine, an anti-malaria drug that has been frequently touted by President Trump as a potential treatment for COVID-19.The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved under emergency use authorization the first of its kind at-home diagnostic test for COVID-19. Developed by LabCorp, the Pixel COVID-19 test includes an at-home collection kit, which will need to be ordered by a doctor, that provides patients with a nasal swab and saline solution for self-sampling. Patients will swab their noses, then mail their samples to LabCorp testing centers where LabCorp will use real-time PCR for diagnosis.

Faces of Innovation—a new GHTC project that features scientists on the front lines of research and development on new global health tools and technologies—profiles Dan Littlefield, who we met at the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene Annual Conference. Dan co-founded a cold-chain engineering company that worked with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority to distribute Ebola vaccines for clinical trials in Sierra Leone.My name: Dan Littlefield, MSWhere I work: Modality Solutions LLC I’m funded by: US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA)My research: I’m a principal and one of the founding members of Modality Solutions. We’re a cold-chain engineering company that’s headquartered in League City, Texas, just outside of Houston. We do a lot of work with pharmaceutical and biotech companies to ensure their product, when it gets to the patient, is just as good as when it left manufacturing.Back in 2015, we were contacted by a contractor for the US government because there was a critical need in West Africa to support getting vaccines there as part of a phase III clinical trial that the CDC and BARDA were sponsoring in Sierra Leone for an Ebola vaccine. Motivation: We’re a growing company, we recruit a lot of young engineers, and when I talk to engineers, I find that we all love to do engineering work, but we also all like the direct impact of helping people. And one of the great things about the work we’re doing, especially with the emergency response clinical trials, is that there is a direct tie between the work we’re doing and how we’re saving lives.Why US federal support is critical: First, this is a national security issue because diseases like Ebola are dangerous. They’re dangerous to civilian populations in West Africa and potentially dangerous to US populations as well. And I think there’s an important diplomatic aspect to it. A lot of these countries are allies to the United States, and one of the ways to lift them up and improve living conditions in those countries is to go and do this kind of work. It also provides a stabilizing influence and improves local capabilities as well. That’s one of the things we try to focus on: it’s not about going in and doing the work and leaving, it’s about going in and training the local staff because a lot of very smart pharmacists and medical doctors don’t have a lot of experience dealing with heat transfer and thermal packaging and managing temperature-sensitive pharmaceuticals. If we can go in and transfer that knowledge, it really enhances them and helps them for the future, not just for clinical trials, but even just for standard vaccine strategies and drug treatments.When I’m not in the lab: My hobby is that I work as a reserve patrol sergeant with the Galveston Sherriff’s office. Galveston County is a big county just south of Houston. I work uniform patrol there, and I’m a weapons and tactics instructor for the department—so that fills up the rest of my time.

Faces of Innovation—a new GHTC project that features scientists on the front lines of research and development on new global health tools and technologies—profiles Dr. Rohit Ramchandani, who we met at the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene Annual Conferenc. Dr. Ramchandani does research to innovate global treatment options for childhood diarrhea at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health in Baltimore, Maryland and the University of Waterloo. My name: Rohit Ramchandani, DrPHWhere I work: Johns Hopkins School of Public Health in Baltimore, Maryland and the University of WaterlooI’m funded by: US Agency for International DevelopmentMy research: My research focuses on diarrhea in children…the second-leading cause of death in children under five globally…These are close to 500,000 deaths that are happening every year, most of which are preventable, and treatable. They’re treatable with medicines, oral rehydration salts [ORS] and zinc. That’s the globally recommended treatment for diarrhea. But the problem is, in many low- and middle-income countries, access to these medicines is not where it should be, particularly in rural communities. So we looked at that issue of access. We did it by leveraging human-centered design approach. And we really focused on the details and the challenges that mothers face treating their children with diarrhea…Our research showed that 40% of the time, mothers are preparing ORS in the wrong concentration: either too diluted, or too concentrated. That can lead to hypernatremia, that can make the diarrhea even worse, or the efficacy gets reduced if it’s too diluted. So we actually worked with a local pharmaceutical company in Zambia to shrink down then size of the ORS sachets—the standard all over the world is a one-liter sachet—we shrunk those down to make 200-mililiter sachets, and then we made the packaging double as a measurement vessel for the right amount of water…One of our key funders during our scale-up phase was USAID—their Discover Health Program. They played a fundamental role in some of the social marketing we were doing as we were scaling up the development of our diarrhea treatment kit.Motivation: There’s just a fundamental issue of justice in the world…We often think of innovation being new product development, high technology, but things like ORS and zinc—innovation can happen really in the delivery side of things. And that’s really where our innovation focused.Why federal support is critical: I think this is low-hanging fruit. Diarrhea, as one of the leading causes of death in the world for children—we have the solutions, we know what to do, and these kinds of innovations can really make a huge difference in saving lives.…[And] there’s a health security argument [to do this work]. The world is getting smaller and smaller every day. We are inextricably linked to one another. When I’m not in the lab: I’m a dad! I’m a dad of two amazing young girls. They inspire me every day. It makes my work in child health that much more meaningful—the inspiration I get from them. I want all parents to have that.

Faces of Innovation—a new GHTC project that features scientists on the front lines of research and development on new global health tools and technologies—profiles Dr. Vinayak Joshi, who we met at the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene Annual Conference. Dr. Joshi is working on a diagnostic for cerebral malaria with support from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.My name: Vinayak Joshi, PhDWhere I work: VisionQuest Biomedical Inc.I’m funded by: National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), National Institutes of Health (NIH)My research: We are developing a user-friendly, fully automated, and simple-to-use diagnostic for cerebral malaria. Today, cerebral malaria misdiagnosis causes hundreds of thousands of deaths in African children. With improved diagnostic accuracy, we can prevent many of those deaths and associated disabilities. Motivation: My background is in machine learning software development for medical diagnosis. In my PhD research, I developed an algorithm for detecting malarial biomarkers in eyes. Later, I got a chance to visit one of the malaria clinics—and I learned that this particular kind of malaria, cerebral malaria, is one of the largest killers of children in Africa—and I actually witnessed a child’s death which left an impression on my mind. Rather than just focusing on developing an algorithm, I reasoned that developing a tool that would lead to greater accessibility and was affordable to the target population in Africa, would make a significant humanitarian contribution.Why US federal support is critical: One of the major goals of this work is to prevent deaths in young children. For such two- to three-year-old kids—it is one of the biggest global health problems. After a child is affected with cerebral malaria, one needs to take action in 24 to 48 hours, otherwise it results in death. It may not be always reported in the news media, but hundreds of thousands of deaths occur every year from this issue. The death toll and neurological disability in children caused by this disease are important problems, often overlooked by the world outside of sub-Saharan Africa. The United States does a lot of noble work in different countries, in health care, development, other infrastructure, and I think this is one of the problems that should receive more attention. There are many technologies being developed, but developers can’t find the channels to commercialize them, because the African market is not where you make money—you do it for humanitarian purposes. But to develop any product you need money, and I think the US government should look into it. They should support the institutions that produce the tools but have to find sources of funding to commercialize these technologies and make them accessible to the target population.When I’m not in the lab: I like a lot of traveling—it’s one of my hobbies. I don’t particularly like to go to top tourist destinations. I like to explore new, unexplored parts of the country.