💉 Bayer causing cancer, curing cancer; CEPI and Oxford vs Junín virus; A CERCLE for equitable research
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💉 Bayer causing cancer, curing cancer; CEPI and Oxford vs Junín virus; A CERCLE for equitable research
#464 | ADCs find friends; A super melanin defence; Losing sleep pays dividends
Hello, and welcome back to The Kable one last time this week. As always, we have a packed issue for you today, with drugs, disease, and development all vying for the spotlight.
In startup news from Africa, Nigerian health tech startup Wellahealth has launched its Healthsend Africa platform in Kenya, enabling Kenyans to purchase authentic medications for chronic conditions internationally and receive them at home, with plans to add more health services soon. Building on the company's success in Nigeria, this initiative aims to improve access to quality medicines and healthcare management amidst concerns about counterfeit drugs.
Napo Pharmaceuticals subsidiary Jaguar Health has entered into a revenue sharing and commercialisation agreement with Quadri Pharma, granting exclusive rights to promote, commercialise, and distribute a powder formulation of Crofelemer in the Middle East for rare diseases like MVID and SBS. Additionally, this partnership, which builds on a previous agreement, will see Quadri Pharma co-funding development costs and distributing the medication through Named Patient Programs in the region, catering to patients with limited treatment options.
A new report by BCG and B Capital says the digital healthcare industry in India is projected to expand significantly from $2.7 billion in 2022 to around $37 billion by 2030, spurred by rapid digitisation and supportive government initiatives, despite current developmental lags and structural challenges.
On the one hand, Bayer is shelling out millions of dollars, thanks to lawsuits that found it guilty of causing cancer. On the other hand, Bayer and the Broad Institute of MIT have extended their partnership for another five years to enhance cancer research, focusing on discovering new cancer targets and therapeutic strategies. This extension, building on a successful alliance, which has already produced three clinical oncology candidates, aims to develop transformative cancer medicines through combined expertise in drug discovery and development.
Bird flu is back to grace our weekday dispatches. It is back in Mexico, which is experiencing a new outbreak of the H5N1 bird flu in Sonora. 15,000 hens have been found dead, and containment measures - including culling and quarantine - are underway. So much for recent declarations of the country being disease-free.
CEPI, meanwhile, in furtherance of its 100 Days Mission, is partnering with the University of Oxford to develop early-stage vaccines targeting the Junín virus, an arenavirus causing severe haemorrhagic fevers. With up to $25 million of funding from CEPI, this initiative uses the ChAdOx platform, which previously came in handy in developing Oxford's Covid-19 vaccine.
Leading scientists have launched the Coalition for Equitable Research in Low-resource settings (CERCLE) to advocate for fair funding and collaboration in research on diseases in low-resource settings, which often suffer the most yet contribute the least to global health decision-making. CERCLE, emerging from the COVID-19 Clinical Research Coalition, emphasises the need for locally relevant research and greater involvement of scientists from low- and middle-income countries in shaping public health policies and practices.
What is a day without an update from the WHO? Early last month, the WHO and the BMJ hosted an online roundtable to create developmentally suitable and culturally sensitive guiding principles for youth mental health content on digital platforms. This nothingburger update ends with the promise of a follow-up meeting report from the BMJ. And, in more WHO news, the agency has updated its guidelines on TB treatment, emphasising the need for shorter, safer, and more effective treatments, alongside improved tests for monitoring and optimising therapy. Duh!
And finally, while pontificators keep pontificating and polluters keep polluting, Earth keeps up its steady march towards a date with a 1.5°C threshold. A new study published in the Oxford Open Climate Change warns that the world is on course to surpass this critical global warming limit within this decade itself.
Every Friday, we relax our paywall so you can see for yourself the value of paying ₹500/month (or ₹4500/year) for a concise download of the day’s top news and events at the intersection of human and animal health, climate change and environmental science. Please consider becoming a paid subscriber.
The Week That Was
Usually, we love to hate on mosquitoes, but there was good news on the dengue front on Monday. In an experiment in three Colombian cities, the World Mosquito Program released Aedes aegyptimosquitoes carrying the Wolbachia bacterium, which prevents them from transmitting viruses. Lo and behold, these cities witnessed a dramatic fall of 94 to 97% in dengue incidence. Barring this story, Monday brought some less-than-promising updates.
In Africa’s bid to become self-reliant in pharmaceutical manufacturing, poor facilities, a lack of finance, staff shortages, or IP rights are significant challenges, but they aren’t the most daunting. A Devex article cited officials as claiming that country-level regulatory hurdles will be the toughest to overcome as the European Union looks to shift manufacturing to African countries.
Co-convened by the WHO and the World Bank, the Global Preparedness Monitoring Board released its 2023 report titled ‘A Fragile State of Preparedness’. The title gives it all away - global preparedness for pandemics and other disease outbreaks remains less than adequate.
Then came Tuesday. Halloween 👻. Of course, there was scary news - like that of the infectious skin disease scabies making a comeback in Malawi, all thanks to climate change.
More scares from research published in the American Heart Association’s Circulation journal. The study found that compared to a 2008-2019 baseline, cardiovascular deaths from extreme heat in the United States may more than double between 2036 and 2065. 🥵
On Wednesday, we carried results of a major INTERPOL operation to crack down on illicit medicines across 89 countries. Operation Pangea XVI resulted in 72 arrests globally, the seizure of potentially dangerous pharma products worth over $7 million, 325 new investigations, and the closure of over 1,300 criminal websites. Fun fact: erectile dysfunction medications are still the most seized medicine worldwide.
Also, the Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI) released Issue 14 of its annual HIV market report. The report not only highlights trends in HIV testing, treatment, and prevention in LMICs but also forecasts API demand in generic-accessible LMICs and benchmarks antiretroviral prices.
Alarmingly, researchers from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and their collaborators found a statistically significant relationship between Brazil’s soy expansion and childhood deaths from acute lymphoblastic leukaemia (ALL) in the region. Something to think about the next time you sip on your soy milk latte. ☕
Yesterday, the South Korea-based International Vaccine Institute (IVI) teamed up with KEMRI-Wellcome Trust Research Programme (KWTRP) and Korea Biopharmaceutical CMO (K-Bio CMO) to train African vaccine manufacturing industry workers on all aspects of the upstream production process. A big win for biological manufacturing capabilities in Africa!
31 biotech, biopharma, and life science companies and educational institutions at the forefront of mRNA and next-gen encoding RNA therapeutics and vaccine development launched the Alliance for mRNA Medicines (AMM) – the first and only scientific and policy organisation focused solely on advancing and advocating for mRNA innovation worldwide.
And finally, research revealed that simply breathing in parts of South Asia can give you diabetes. Research conducted in the Indian cities of Delhi and Chennai found that inhaling air with high amounts of PM2.5 particles led to high blood sugar levels and increased type 2 diabetes incidence.
Newsworthy
Prepping for future pandemics. Disease outbreaks in Africa – like the 2014-2016 Ebola outbreak in West Africa and the Covid-19 pandemic – have had disastrous health and economic effects due to poor health system responses. This episode of the Africa Science Focus podcast by SciDev.Net delves into how prepared African countries are to deal with future health emergencies. The host speaks with recipients of the Covid-19 Africa Rapid Grant Fund about challenges plaguing the continent and their research on potential responses Africa could employ in the case of future health crises.
(SciDev.Net)
The need for integrated dengue management. Over the past 50 years, the number of dengue cases has increased 30-fold globally. In the past few years, countries in South and Southeast Asia like Bangladesh, India, Thailand, Malaysia, and more have suffered worse dengue outbreaks than usual, that too outside of traditional peak seasons. As climate patterns shift, there is also the high risk that dengue will do its damage in non-endemic countries in the years to come. This has not only adverse health impacts but also heavy economic ones – the disease poses a global economic burden of up to $8.9 billion.
The World Economic Forum reckons we need a comprehensive strategy with targeted measures to manage the disease if we are to achieve the SDG target of a zero-mortality rate for dengue by 2030. This includes the rollout of a safe and efficacious vaccine combined with existing surveillance, vector control measures, and community awareness. The WEF outlines the dangers of dengue, the complex mechanisms underlying the disease which make treatment and immunisation that much tougher, and the vaccines that have been developed nonetheless.
(WEF)
R&D
ADCs getting a lil help from immune boosters. Large benefits in cancer treatments aren’t very common; even just a few added months of survival are celebrated as breakthroughs. For advanced bladder cancer, especially, even decades of research haven’t yielded any substantial improvements in survival rates. Enter ADCs. At the European Society for Medical Oncology Congress, cancer researchers presented data about a combo of the ADC Enfortumab Vedotin (marketed as Padcev) with Pembrolizumab (Keytruda) to treat bladder cancer. The treatment, already approved by the US FDA, was tested in a larger population than in the initial study. The researchers found that the combo treatment cut the risk of death in people with advanced bladder cancer by more than half!
ADCs, or antibody-drug conjugates, are marketed against several cancers, but researchers are still figuring out how best to use them clinically. The results from this bladder cancer study suggest that ADCs might become more potent in combination with immune-boosting drugs. This article in Nature spotlights the important role that combination treatments might play in treating several cancers. A lot more research is necessary to develop less toxic ADCs and to find which drugs can be used safely with them. Nonetheless, things are looking up for the future of cancer treatments!
(Nature)
Super melanin to the rescue. How many times have you come home from a day out and regretted forgetting to lather yourself with sunscreen? Once the damage has been done, there aren’t many tools to restore your skin to the way it was. But now researchers have created super melanin 🦸♀️💪🏽, a synthetic version of the natural pigment in our skin and hair, which doubles the rate of post-injury skin healing when applied as a skin cream. What’s more, this novel cream could prevent skin damage in the first place, be it from overexposure to the sun, radiation therapy, or chemical burns. The scientists are still unsure about which of their super melanin-making methods is superior, and studies are still ongoing to verify the effectiveness of their intervention. Either way, this treatment could be a game-changer for patients with burns of all kinds.
(npj Regenerative Medicine)
The Kibble
Tired and wired. Chronic sleep loss has been well explored, and the unanimous verdict is that it’s pretty bad for your health. But brief sleep loss? That’s been shrouded in more mystery. Neurobiologists from Northwestern University took it upon themselves to explore the effects of those all-nighters some of us like to pull prior to deadlines. They found that mild, acute sleep deprivation resulted in increased dopamine release and enhanced synaptic plasticity, aka brain rewiring that keeps up your cheerful, bubbly mood for a few days after the sleep loss. Uncovering this secret to (temporary) cheerfulness could help scientists better understand how fast-acting antidepressants work and also help them identify new targets for depression meds. But until then, this is not a recommendation to pull an all-nighter to fight off the blues.
(Neuron)
Bottom line
The underestimated killers of the future. Heatwaves are emerging as the most lethal extreme weather events, with research suggesting that annual heat-related deaths could be 30 times higher than previously estimated, potentially reaching half a million between 2000 and 2019. Despite this grave risk, only half of the world’s nations offer heat warning services, and a mere 23% of health ministries use meteorological data to monitor climate-sensitive health risks. According to the 2023 State of Climate Services Report by the WMO, only 26 countries possess climate-informed, heat-health early warning systems. The report underscores the health sector's lack of preparedness in protecting society against climate-related health threats.
The report's release has prompted calls for enhanced climate information to support health sector needs, ranging from heat-health warning systems to infectious disease risk mapping. WHO and WMO officials highlighted the significant opportunities to integrate climate science into health policy to prepare for climate impacts on health, although currently, health-focused projects receive only a sliver of adaptation finance. Success stories, like Fiji's data-sharing for disease tracking and Argentina's heat-health alert system, illustrate the benefits of partnerships between health and meteorological services. With health now a priority at the upcoming COP28, the report stresses the urgent need for improved collaboration between health and climate communities to address the growing climate impacts on health.
(Health Policy Watch, WMO)
Oh, and Gopal Nair doesn't want you to see this.
Every Friday, we relax our paywall so you can see for yourself the value of paying ₹500/month (or ₹4500/year) for a concise download of the day’s top news and events at the intersection of human and animal health, climate change and environmental science. Please consider becoming a paid subscriber.