Bharat Biotech will partner with Spain’s Biofabri to develop, manufacture and distribute a novel, live attenuated tuberculosis vaccine candidate, the companies announced Wednesday. The tie-up aims to guarantee the future supply of MTBVAC in over 70 countries, “especially in Southeast Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa,” according to a joint press release.
The shot originated at the University of Zaragoza. Additional collaborators include the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative and the…
Breakthrough research in TB treatment, testing and transmission took center stage at this year’s 52nd Union World Conference on Lung Health, held virtually between October 19-22.
First, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) researchers presented new data from a Phase 2/3 trial showing that an investigational, all-oral, six-month regimen is safer and more successful at treating rifampicin-resistant TB than the current options. According to an MSF press release, 89% of participants in the TB-…
Otsuka announced last week that the EMA’s Committee for Medicinal Products for Human Use (CHMP) recommended approval of Deltyba, the Japanese firm’s dispersible delamanid tablet, for multidrug-resistant pulmonary tuberculosis in patients of all ages weighing at least 10 kilograms (22 pounds).
Gilead, Merck and the TB Alliance were among the players touting new data at the 11th International AIDS Society Conference on HIV Science (IAS 2021), held in a virtual format July 18-21.
Gilead on Saturday offered promising Phase 2/3 news on lenacapavir, its investigational, long-acting HIV-1 capsid inhibitor, which it said achieved “high rates of virologic suppression” at week 26 in people living with HIV whose virus was no longer effectively responding to therapy. A company press…
Europe’s public-private Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI) announced last week the launch of UNITE4TB—a $218 million, seven-year project to accelerate and improve the clinical evaluation of combinations of existing and novel drugs as treatment regimens for drug-resistant and drug-sensitive tuberculosis. UNITE4TB is the newest project of IMI’s AMR Accelerator.
The consortium—which involves 30 partners including academic institutions, GSK, J&J’s Janssen subsidiary, KNCV…
J&J last week launched a research center hosted at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) that will focus on antimicrobial resistance (AMR) and next-generation TB drug regimens. The J&J Satellite Center for Global Health Discovery at LSHTM marks the first in a planned series of academic research centers, according to a company press release.
Each center will partner with academic institutions to focus on threats with high unmet need, including AMR,…
The International AIDS Vaccine Initiative and Spanish biopharma Biofabri announced on Wednesday that they will collaborate on Phase 3 efficacy studies for the novel tuberculosis vaccine candidate MTBVAC. The trials are scheduled to start in several African countries this year.
Biofabri licensed MTBVAC for commercialization from Spain’s University of Zaragoza.
In its 13th annual G-FINDER report, released last week, Australian think tank Policy Cures Research said global funding for neglected diseases R&D remained “stable” at $3.88 billion in 2019, one year before the start of the Covid-19 pandemic.
However, the overall stability masked underlying changes. Private sector funding from the year prior dropped 19%, a shift offset by a 2.8% increase in public sector funding and a 5.2% jump in philanthropic funding, the report said.
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Sanofi CEO Paul Hudson announced on Tuesday the creation of a nonprofit unit, Sanofi Global Health, which will provide 40 lower-income countries with access to 30 of the company’s “most essential medicines,” including cardiovascular, diabetes, tuberculosis, malaria and cancer treatments.
An accompanying press release said Sanofi Global Health will be the cornerstone of the Paris-based company’s corporate social responsibility strategy for “access to medicines, support for vulnerable…
Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) used Wednesday’s World Tuberculosis Day to announce that its candidate six-month, all-oral regimen is superior to locally accepted 9-20-month care standards for multidrug-resistant TB. MSF has now stopped enrollment in the Phase 2/3 trial of the treatment—containing bedaquiline, linezolid, moxifloxacin and pretomanid—based on an independent data safety and monitoring board recommendation, the press release said. MSF said it plans to share its data with WHO “as…