Unitaid seeks to fund innovative projects against TB and drug-resistance

Unitaid today launched a call for proposals for projects that will fight tuberculosis and its drug-resistant strains through innovative diagnostics, wider use of the best new drugs for adults and children, and new technologies that remind patients to take their medicines on schedule.

To meet the challenge of quickly diagnosing drug-resistant TB, Unitaid is keen to fund projects that would widen access to targeted gene sequencing, a technique that finds genetic mutations in TB bacteria that are associated with drug resistance. Doctors can use targeted gene sequencing to evaluate the bacteria in a patient’s sample, quickly see which TB medicines are not likely to work, and choose the best combinations of available medicines for that patient.

Unitaid is also seeking to fund proposals that work toward:

  • boosting the use of quality-assured drugs to treat drug-resistant TB, ensuring a more stable supply, and collecting data to help shape treatment with a focus on vulnerable groups such as children.
  • showing the usefulness of technologies to help patients complete treatment . “Adherence technologies” can include, but are not limited to, devices like smart pillboxes that take note of when they are opened and pills are removed, electronic reminders, smartphone applications and other such inventions.

Through its calls for proposals, Unitaid finds smart new ideas to help relieve the burden of diseases such as HIV/AIDS, TB and malaria. A review committee of independent experts in global health helps Unitaid choose the best proposals to fund through a competitive selection process.

Drug-resistant tuberculosis is a global health crisis. In 2016, 600,000 people were believed to have the disease, but less than 22 percent of them were detected and enrolled in treatment. Of the treated patients, less than 12 percent were cured. TB is the most prevalent among diseases affected by antimicrobial resistance. Multidrug-resistant TB is responsible for a third of all deaths caused by antimicrobial resistance.

Although recent strides against TB have been significant—notably the introduction of the new drugs bedaquiline and delamanid and the expanded use of GeneXpert machines for diagnosis—the global health community is looking for further improvements to end the epidemic by the  target date of 2035 set by the UN.

Unitaid’s investments support global drive to end TB

Geneva — On the occasion of World TB Day, Unitaid wishes to reassert its commitment to ending tuberculosis, with special consideration for the estimated 1 million children who are among the most vulnerable and neglected victims of this curable disease.

Since its inception, Unitaid has funded more than US$ 460 million in innovative TB grants. In the last quarter of 2017, Unitaid turned decisively toward providing more help for children, with $117 million in new grants that include paediatric TB prevention, diagnosis and treatment.

“We are not standing still in our response,” Unitaid Executive Director Lelio Marmora said. “We’re increasing our investments and confronting tuberculosis and its drug-resistant strains on every front—prevention, testing and treatment.”

One of Unitaid’s highest priorities is investing in innovative grants to keep drugs effective in the face of a world crisis of resistant bugs, including strains of bacteria that cause TB. About half of Unitaid’s  US$ 1 billion grant portfolio is invested in projects that fight antimicrobial resistance.

Unitaid has invested US $26 million in TB Xpert, an innovative machine that quickly diagnoses TB and its drug-resistant forms, and US $60 million in the EndTB project to improve treatment for multidrug-resistant TB.

Unitaid is an important contributor to the massive global effort to end the world’s TB epidemic by 2030. The World Health Organization’s End TB Strategy is a blueprint for bringing about an 80 percent drop in new infections, a 90 percent drop in deaths and 100 percent protection for families from catastrophic TB-related costs by the year 2035.

Unitaid’s active TB portfolio provides nearly US$ 180 million for developing innovative drugs, diagnostics and strategies to fight latent, childhood and drug-resistant TB. At the same time, Unitaid funding for the Medicines Patent Pool is being used to bring the best new TB medicines to low-resource countries, as quickly as possible, and at affordable prices. The World Health Organization’s prequalification programme, also supported by Unitaid, approved two child-friendly TB medicines in late 2017.

Our four newest TB grants include:

  • US $ 58 million to expand short-course preventive TB therapy for HIV-positive people and children exposed to TB in Africa, Asia and South America.
  • US $36.3 million to improve the treatment services and market for paediatric TB medicines and incorporate TB control into HIV, maternal and child health services in India and nine African countries.
  • US $14.6 million to widen the availability of childhood TB diagnosis, using fast tests that can be done even in small local clinics. The project is taking place in six African countries and Cambodia.
  • US $7.4 million to collaborate with the World Health Organization’s Global TB Program on diagnosis and treatment of paediatric, latent and multidrug-resistant TB in high-burden countries.

Download here:

  1. our TB impact story
  2. our animation

Unitaid and South Africa partner to accelerate HIV and TB prevention and treatment

Pretoria – Unitaid and South Africa’s National Department of Health have launched a partnership to accelerate the country’s efforts to prevent and treat HIV and tuberculosis. South Africa is home to the world’s biggest HIV/AIDS epidemic, as well as one of the highest TB burdens.

The joint endeavour will introduce HIV self-screening, expand access to prevention for adolescent girls and young women at high risk of HIV infection, and to TB preventive therapy for people living with HIV and children under the age of five. It will also support the development of better first-line HIV treatment, and efforts to find better and shorter treatment for multidrug-resistant TB.

“We are very excited to partner with the South African government to accelerate the introduction of health innovations to prevent, diagnose and treat HIV and TB,” Unitaid Executive Director Lelio Marmora said. “Through this partnership we hope to boost HIV testing, particularly among adolescent girls, young women, and men, and ensure they have access to treatment.”

South Africa is at the forefront of the global AIDS response and has made significant progress in getting people to test for HIV in recent years.  Although South Africa has the world’s largest HIV treatment programme, the country still faces challenges in preventing new infections and reaching the one million people living with HIV who do not know their status.

HIV self-screening is a new, cost-effective way of testing hard-to-reach populations, including young people, men, female sex workers and men who have sex with men. Through its HIV Self-Testing Africa (STAR) project, Unitaid is helping to close the testing gap in six countries in eastern and southern Africa, including South Africa. It is working with the health department and its implementing partners—Society for Family Health, the Clinton Health Access Initiative, the Wits Reproductive Health and HIV Institute and Population Services International—to ensure that HIV self-screening is included in the national HIV programme.

In 2017, the South African government began offering pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP)—a highly effective daily pill to prevent HIV—to adolescent girls and young women.  Unitaid is working closely with the health department and the Wits Reproductive Health and HIV Institute to generate data on how to best deliver PrEP.

TB is the leading infectious disease killer globally and the leading cause of death in South Africa. An estimated 80% of South Africans are infected with TB bacteria, the vast majority of whom have latent TB rather than active TB disease. People living with HIV are 20 to 30 times more likely to develop active TB disease than people not infected with HIV.

People with latent TB have Mycobacterium tuberculosis in their body, but it is inactive; a normal immune system prevents it from causing illness or becoming contagious. However, latent TB bacteria can ‘wake up’, even many years after their arrival in the body, and cause illness. People with weakened immune systems are particularly susceptible to developing active TB.

As South Africa works to end TB, its highest priorities are treating people with multidrug-resistant TB and providing preventive therapy to high-risk populations, including people living with HIV.

With Unitaid funding, The Aurum Institute is scaling up access to affordable short-course preventive therapy for TB, known as 3HP, for people living with HIV and children under age five. The project seeks to establish 3HP as an affordable, less-toxic therapy suitable for wide introduction in 12 countries most affected by TB, including South Africa.

The endTB project, implemented by Partners in Health, Médecins Sans Frontières and Interactive Research and Development, supports the introduction of the first new medicines for drug-resistant TB in nearly half a century in 17 countries, including South Africa.

“These new HIV and TB prevention technologies could have a major impact on the trajectory of the HIV and TB epidemics in South Africa,” said South Africa Minister of Health Aaron Motsoaledi. “We are delighted to be working with Unitaid as we aim to reach the Sustainable Development Goal targets of ending TB and HIV by 2030.”

The partnership announcement was made on the eve of World TB Day during a partners meeting organized by Unitaid on innovations to prevent, diagnose and treat HIV and TB in South Africa.

Unitaid has committed more than US$ 50 million to this multi-year partnership.

Media contacts 

Unitaid : Dominique De Santis (in Pretoria), desantisd@unitaid.who.int, cell. +41 78 911 5327

National Department of Health : Popo Maja, popo.maja@health.gov.za, cell. +27 82 373 1169

Impact story: Childhood tuberculosis

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.

Read Full Report

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 to focus resources on tuberculosis projects under way

Geneva – One of Unitaid’s top priorities is supporting innovations to stop tuberculosis, with a new emphasis on blocking an emerging wave of multidrug-resistant forms of the disease. Since its inception, Unitaid has funded more than US$ 460 million in grants for TB, and has a slate of active TB grants worth nearly US$ 180 million.

In May, Unitaid solicited project proposals for better ways to confront multidrug-resistant tuberculosis. After careful review of the submissions, we have decided, for the immediate future, to concentrate our resources on Unitaid projects that are already under way.
The endTB project (2015-2019), for example, is showing progress in strengthening the market for new drugs to treat multidrug-resistant TB.
Comprising an observational study and a clinical trial of two new drugs, endTB has begun to demonstrate that accelerated access to those medicines can improve outcomes.

Supported by a US$ 60.3 million Unitaid grant, the project is taking place in 15 countries under the leadership of Partners in Health.

In the last few months, meanwhile, Unitaid granted US$ 117 million to four new projects designed to prevent, diagnose and treat latent, drug-resistant and paediatric TB in countries most affected by the disease.
Unitaid deeply appreciates the engagement of those who responded to this latest call for proposals. Although some of the projects were promising, they did not fully align with Unitaid’s strategy or contained elements that were not developed to the point that the organization could offer grant funding.

Unitaid expects ongoing TB projects to yield streams of evidence that will help set the stage for future calls for proposals.