Rapid access to best-in-class HIV medicines
Honouring Professor David Cooper
Geneva – Unitaid is deeply saddened by the death of David Cooper, a leading HIV clinician who was inaugural Director of the Kirby Institute for Infection and Immunity in Society, at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Sydney.
Cooper, who was also a former president of the International AIDS Society, died in Sydney on Sunday after a short illness. He was 69.
The Kirby institute is implementing a Unitaid-funded grant to enable the scale-up of optimized second-line antiretroviral therapy for HIV patients for whom first-line treatment has failed.
Unitaid’s Executive Director Lelio Marmora said Professor Cooper’s untimely death was a deep loss. « David Cooper was a man of vision and an inspirational leader in the fight against HIV. We have lost a distinguished colleague and a tireless campaigner in the HIV community. »
UNSW said in a statement on Monday that under David’s leadership, the Kirby Institute grew from a national centre with a handful of staff into what is now a globally renowned research institute working at the forefront of the latest discoveries and innovations in HIV, viral hepatitis and sexually transmissible infections.
In unveiling the Unitaid grant in 2017, Cooper said that a trial was « exploring whether an alternative regimen of treatment is clinically superior or equal to the currently recommended treatments. Results have the potential to impact the treatment of millions of people living with HIV. »
MID-term evaluation of the PSI HIV self-testing africa (STAR) project
Unitaid’s annual report shows innovation at work to end epidemics
GENEVA – Unitaid is pleased to present its 2016-2017 annual report, which describes a rewarding phase in the fight against the global epidemics of HIV/AIDS — including co-infections such as hepatitis C – and tuberculosis and malaria.
During the two years covered by the report, Unitaid launched a robust new operational strategy that supports the global push to end the three epidemics by 2030. At the same time, we awarded a spectrum of forward-looking grants designed to deploy the world’s best new technologies at the heart of the epidemics.
As Executive Board Chair Celso Amorim has commented, “At Unitaid, we do not pursue innovation for its own sake, but rather as a way to change outcomes in the real world.”
Throughout, Unitaid pursued its flagship projects—from bringing the best new HIV drugs to lower-resource countries to supporting the first new treatments for drug-resistant TB in nearly half a century.
The annual report also reflects our commitment to confront the threat posed by growing resistance to HIV, TB and malaria treatment, a phenomenon caused by misuse of medicines. Resistance threatens to undermine the extraordinary gains that have been made against the diseases over the past two decades. Unitaid has committed more than half its portfolio to projects to stop bacteria, viruses, fungi and parasites becoming resistant to antimicrobial drugs.
Multi-disease testing offers new ways to streamline disease management, Unitaid report says
Geneva – Innovators are responding to the world’s growing co-infection crisis by developing devices that can quickly, accurately diagnose multiple diseases at a time.
Unitaid’s new landscape report, launched today, profiles more than 95 such devices, already on the market or in development, all of which address at least one of Unitaid’s key disease areas—HIV, hepatitis C (HCV), tuberculosis (TB) and malaria.
“The abundance of new, multi-disease technologies is poised to streamline the way diseases are diagnosed,” said Unitaid Executive Director Lelio Marmora. “Global health is moving away from the long-used strategy of separate tests for separate diseases, separate clinics and separate testing labs.”
An estimated 2.3 million people are living with HIV/HCV co-infection, and tuberculosis causes one of every three HIV-related deaths. Alarmingly, the true prevalence of these co-infections is unknown, as many cases are left undetected.
Antimicrobial resistance (AMR), meanwhile, is fueling co-infection by gradually stripping drugs of their power to cure a growing list of infectious diseases. Improved diagnostics could help head off this misuse of antimicrobial drugs.
The report also describes how multi-disease diagnostic platforms can promote affordability, ease-of-use, and faster results delivery. Core technologies such as immunoassays and nucleic acid tests (NATs) are featured, as well as emerging technologies such as next-generation sequencing, volatile organic compounds and immunoassay/NAT integrated platforms.
The report presents an encouraging picture of the global push toward multi-disease diagnostics—a trend also highlighted in the World Health Organization’s June 2017 information note: “Considerations for adoption and use of multi-disease testing devices in integrated laboratory networks”.
Download the report here.
Multi-disease diagnostics landscape for integrated management of HIV, HCV, TB and other coinfections
Unitaid hails new US$ 50 million contribution from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
Geneva — Unitaid warmly welcomes the extension of a long-term partnership with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation with a new commitment of US$ 50 million, bringing the foundation’s total contribution to Unitaid to US$ 150 million since 2006.
In awarding the new grant, the Gates Foundation noted its enthusiasm for working closely with Unitaid to nurture innovations that will bring better access to prevention, diagnosis and treatment of HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria to those who are most in need but live in countries with the scarcest resources. The grant will be disbursed over five years.
Commenting on the contribution, Bill Gates, co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation said: “Unitaid is an important partner for our foundation and the global health community in the fight against HIV, tuberculosis and malaria. Their ability to scale innovative health technologies helps improve and save lives around the world.”
Unitaid investments are effective at delivering innovative, high quality health solutions that ultimately benefit millions of people. As countries and partners scale up these innovations, hundreds of thousands of additional lives are saved, reaping huge savings for health systems in the world’s lowest-resource countries.
“The support of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is helping to bring us all closer to living in a world without the three pandemics,” said Lelio Marmora, Unitaid Executive Director. “We are delighted to continue this dynamic partnership into the next decade.”
Established in 2006 by Brazil, Chile, France, Norway and the United Kingdom to provide an innovative approach to global health, Unitaid has since invested more than US$ 2 billion in promising health solutions that partner organizations can then scale up and make widely available
Under a new five-year strategy adopted in 2016, Unitaid will maintain its commitment to the three diseases while supporting a more integrated approach to health, particularly in reproductive, maternal, newborn and child health.
Currently, Unitaid is supporting programs to introduce HIV self-testing kits on a large scale; launching a new generation of state-of-the-art HIV drugs in low- and middle-income countries; developing better treatments for drug-resistant tuberculosis; and working on new treatments for severe malaria and on preventing malaria deaths among pregnant women and infants.
Media contact
Andrew Hurst, Unitaid, Geneva – tel. +41 22 791 3859, hursta@unitaid.who.int