While CRISPR, nanobots and transplants are making headlines as medical breakthroughs, a number of new technologies- the unsung heroes of medicine, are also making progress tackling some of the toughest age-old diseases still plaguing millions of people in the poorest parts of the world.
Neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) are a group of devastating viral, bacterial, and parasitic diseases that predominantly burden individuals and communities living in poverty.
The moniker “neglected” is attributable to the lack of attention from the global biopharmaceutical community, and the resultant dearth of products available to prevent, diagnose, and treat them.
This has been changing, though- Sanofi brought a somewhat controversial Dengue vaccine to market, and Merck (MSD) bought into and advanced a 100% effective Ebola vaccine. Bavarian Nordic, one of Europe’s largest biotechs, has also taken a stab at Ebola through their J&J collaboration, and its joint candidate is in Phase III.
Other instances of Biotechs stepping up to develop cutting-edge analytical methods in this direction are detailed below.
Vienna based biotech, Themis has in its pipeline, candidates in Phase II for Chikungunya and Phase I for Zika, not to mention others in preclinical development for dengue and RSV. Most recently, the NIH decided to sponsor the Chikungunya vaccine following its stellar Phase I results, where all 42
patients in the study produced antibodies for the virus, and now an 180-patient Phase I/II trial will be conducted in the US.The Oxford spinout, SpyBiotech is developing a platform that could theoretically be applied to any disease, which is reportedly so exciting as to lure Google’s venture capital arm to go in on a massive £4M (€4.7M) seed round earlier this year.
The company is manipulating “superglue” that binds bacteria together to underpin what it hopes will be a new generation of vaccines.
“Our key advancement was making [the intramolecular bond between bacteria] intermolecular via genetic engineering,” Professor of Biochemistry at Oxford and co-founder of SpyBiotech Mark Howarth tells.
He and his co-founder and fellow Professor Sumi Biswas see the superglue as a much more reliable and cost-efficient alternative to the existing method of genetic fusion. “Genetic fusion involves taking molecular components that have evolved independently, such that they’re mostly incompatible, and we view this superglue as a game changer to enable faster development of effective vaccines against major global diseases.”
Oxitec’s GM mosquitoes, needless to say are generating a lot of “buzz” for their efficacy at containing outbreaks. The company reported in April that its sterile critters, called ‘Friendly Aedes,’ reduced the number of dengue fever cases by 91% following an 82% reduction in larvae.
As Oxitec’s CEO Hadyn Parry explains, “We’re not using chemicals, we’re using the mosquito against itself” by engineering a ‘self-limiting gene’ in males that causes their offspring to die young. The company’s next projects are to target the Anopheles mosquito, which spreads Malaria, and selectively kill female offspring since males don’t bite.
The French biotech, Abivax, has made a name for itself as a leader in infectious disease with a candidate showing promise as a functional HIV cure. And despite its focus on this area, the biotech is now applying the technology in the pursuit of antiviral drugs to serve as treatments for Ebola, Chikungunya, and Dengue among other diseases.
Humabs, a Swiss biotech, is currently making headlines by isolating an effective antibody against Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, as well as partnering its influenza program with MedImmune.
Humabs is built on technology that harvests antibodies from memory B cells and plasma cells from patients in recovery. “The platform hinges on memory B cells from patients who have experienced an infection from a disease like Zika,” Davide Corti, CSO of Humabs, said. “Monoclonal antibodies can be isolated and produced directly from immortalized human B cells” in a process that makes it possible to efficiently test specificity and functionality of the isolated antibodies.
The examples above describe but a few of the numerous opportunities that biopharmaceutical companies have to contribute to the development of products for NTDs. With 1.4 billion people currently affected by at least one NTD, any contribution – compounds, data, expertise, or equipment – has the propensity to dramatically improve the lives of people across the globe.
