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2023-07-01 Science & Technology
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Bill Gates Commits $400 Million to Test New TB Vaccine on 26,000 People in Africa and Southeast Asia
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[The Defender] The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Wellcome Trust on Wednesday announced plans to fund a phase 3 clinical trial for a tuberculosis (TB) vaccine that will be tested on 26,000 people at 50 sites in Africa and Southeast Asia over the next four to six years.
Gates committed $400 million to the trial and Wellcome — the largest funder of medical research in the U.K. and one of the largest in the world — committed an additional $150 million.
The trials will test the M72/AS01 vaccine, developed by pharmaceutical giant GSK (formerly GlaxoSmithKline) with partial funding from the Gates Foundation.
Experts told The Washington Post the news was "huge." The Guardian heralded the announcement as "gamechanging," while STAT called it "promising."
But Brian Hooker, Ph.D., P.E., senior director of science and research for Children’s Health Defense told The Defender that the planned trials for the TB vaccine raised red flags.
"I’m concerned that they’re planning on conducting the trial in underdeveloped nations," Hooker said. "It seems almost prototypical that the underserved have to be guinea pigs for the rest of the world."
He added, "Fifty percent is incredibly low efficacy for such an ’important’ intervention to go to essentially everyone in the developing world."
TB MORE COMMON AMONG POOR
| Everything bad is more common among the poor. |
GSK developed the vaccine and ran smaller, "proof-of-concept" phase 2b trials on it in 2018, reporting a 54% efficacy rate. But the vaccine maker didn’t move forward with the large-scale trials needed for a license.
Instead, it passed the license to the Gates Medical Research Institute, a nonprofit biotech spinoff of the Gates Foundation dedicated to developing "novel biomedical interventions" to treat global health problems.
The existing vaccine for TB, the BCG (bacille Calmette-Guérin) vaccine, was developed in 1921 and is effective at stopping TB infection among children but has limited efficacy in adults.
Recent estimates suggest up to 25% of the global population carries a latent (asymptomatic) TB infection, which may later become active among 5-15% of latent carriers. People with latent infection cannot spread the disease.
TB kills 1.6 million people per year, primarily in low and middle-income countries. It is treatable and curable with antibiotics. Drug-resistant strains have emerged, but those also are treatable and curable using second-line drugs. 
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Posted by Besoeker 2023-07-01 07:09||
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Posted by NN2N1 2023-07-01 07:21||
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