No cold chain required
High-quality alternative
Just as effective
Prioritized by WHO
What is heat-stable carbetocin and how can it help combat maternal mortality?
Postpartum hemorrhage is the leading cause of death in women giving birth. The medicine that is most used to prevent and treat postpartum hemorrhage, oxytocin, is often of low-quality and requires cold chain storage, making it unsuitable for use in many lower-level health centers. Heat-stable carbetocin is a high-quality medicine that can be used in place of oxytocin for the prevention of postpartum hemorrhage.
Unitaid is supporting a clinical trial to evaluate its potential to also treat postpartum hemorrhage to expand use and access to a high-quality alternative to oxytocin for both treatment and prevention for women giving birth in low- and middle-income countries.
Why are heat-stable medicines so important in resource-limited settings?
Power outages, equipment failures and an unreliable electric grid can make it difficult to ensure cold-chain storage in many low- and middle-income countries, particularly in lower-level health settings where most people go for care. Medicines that must be stored at consistently low temperatures degrade in quality when this cannot be maintained. This is the case with oxytocin, the most used medicine for preventing severe bleeding in childbirth. A heat-stable alternative would help make prevention options more widely available.
Why do most postpartum hemorrhage related deaths occur in low- and middle-income countries?
Severe bleeding in childbirth is often diagnosed too late, because health care providers must rely on visual approximations of blood loss, which can delay access to treatment. Many health centers do not have critical prevention and treatment medicines on hand and even when they do, they are often of poor quality and lack the trained personnel needed to administer the drugs. Additionally, many women still give birth without the support of a skilled birth attendant and are far from a health center where they can get emergency care if they need it.
How is Unitaid helping to accelerate access?
Unitaid is funding clinical research evaluating the safety and efficacy of heat-stable carbetocin as a treatment for postpartum hemorrhage and working to catalyze uptake of this new drug for prevention, while working to improve access to other detection and treatment tools that could further improve outcomes for women giving birth in low- and middle-income countries.
