Global health organizations commit to new ways of working together for greater impact

Berlin – Eleven heads of the world’s leading health and development organizations today signed a landmark commitment to find new ways of working together to accelerate progress towards achieving the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals.

Coordinated by the World Health Organization, the initiative unites the work of 11 organizations, with others set to join in the next phase.

The commitment follows a request from Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo of Ghana, and Prime Minister Erna Solberg of Norway, with support from United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, to develop a global action plan to define how global actors can better collaborate to accelerate progress towards the health-related targets of the 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda.

“Healthy people are essential for sustainable development – to ending poverty, promoting peaceful and inclusive societies and protecting the environment. However, despite great strides made against many of the leading causes of death and disease, we must redouble our efforts or we will not reach several of the health-related targets,” the organizations announced today at the World Health Summit in Berlin. “The Global Action Plan represents an historic commitment to new ways of working together to accelerate progress toward meeting the 2030 goals. We are committed to redefine how our organizations work together to deliver more effective and efficient support to countries and to achieve better health and well-being for all people.”

The group has agreed to develop new ways of working together to maximize resources and measure progress in a more transparent and engaging way. The first phase of the plan’s development is organized under three strategic approaches: align, accelerate and account.

Align: The organizations have committed to coordinate programmatic, financing and operational processes to increase collective efficiency and impact on a number of shared priorities such as gender equality and reproductive, maternal, newborn, child and adolescent health.

Accelerate: They have agreed to develop common approaches and coordinate action in areas of work that have the potential to increase the pace of progress in global health. The initial set of seven “accelerators” include community and civil society engagement, research and development, data and sustainable financing.

Account: To improve transparency and accountability to countries and development partners, the health organizations are breaking new ground by setting common milestones for nearly 50 health-related targets across 14 Sustainable Development Goals. These milestones will provide a critical checkpoint and common reference to determine where the world stands in 2023 and whether it is on track to reach the 2030 goals.

The Global Action Plan will also enhance collective action and leverage funds to address gender inequalities that act as barriers to accessing health, and to improve comprehensive quality health care for women and girls, including sexual and reproductive health services.

The organizations that have already signed up to the Global Action Plan for Healthy Lives and Well-being for All are: Gavi the Vaccine Alliance, the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, the Global Financing Facility, UNAIDS, UNDP, UNFPA, UNICEF, Unitaid, UN Women, the World Bank and WHO. The World Food Programme has committed to join the plan in the coming months.

The final plan will be delivered in September 2019 at the United Nations General Assembly.

For more information, www.who.int/sdg/global-action-plan

Media enquiries

Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance : Frédérique Tissandier; +41 79 300 8253; ftissandier@gavi.org

Global Fund: Ibon Villelabeitia; +41 79 292 5426; ibbon.Villelabeitia@theglobalfund.org

UNAIDS: Sophie Barton-Knott; +41 79 514 6896; bartonknotts@unaids.org

UNDP: Adam Cathro; +19179159725; adam.cathro@undp.org

UNFPA: Omar Gharzeddine; +1 212 297 5028; gharzeddine@unfpa.org

UNICEF: Sabrina Sidhu; +1 917 476 1537; ssidhu@unicef.org

Unitaid: Andrew Hurst, +41795616807; hursta@unitaid.who.int

UN Women: Maria Sanchez Aponte; +16467814507; maria.sanchez@unwomen.org

World Bank Group: Maya Brahmam; +1 202 361 2594; mbrahmam@worldbankgroup.org

WHO: Christian Lindmeier; +4179 500 6552; lindmeierch@who.int

Peru pioneers new treatment for drug-resistant TB — a photo story

Peru pioneers new treatment for drug-resistant TB – a photo story

How next generation regimens could turn the tide on multidrug-resistant TB Peru is one of the world’s fastest-growing economies. Its capital, Lima, tucked between the Pacific Ocean and surrounding valleys, bustles with trendy restaurants, cafés, museums, shops, and lots of traffic. Close to 10 million people live in Lima today and the population is growing.

The Hummingbird. Unitaid News – September 2018

The Hummingbird

At UNGA, Unitaid highlights urgent need to speed up innovation to end TB

New York – As heads of state and leaders unveiled ambitious plans to fight tuberculosis at the first-ever United Nations High-Level Meeting on the disease, Unitaid has highlighted the special role it is playing to speed introduction of health innovations that are essential to end the disease.

“The road that leads from the laboratory to the final point of delivery of a health product in a clinic or village pharmacy is long and arduous,” said Unitaid Executive Director Lelio Marmora at a panel on TB on Wednesday afternoon. “It is vital to ensure we achieve the ultimate objective of our work of bringing an innovation to scale so it reaches the maximum number of people at the best possible price.”

Marmora said that one of the challenges in introducing innovative health solutions in low-income countries has often been the lack of a market big enough to attract pharmaceutical manufacturers. “This is precisely when well-targeted catalytic investments are called for.”

More than 80 countries are today using a child-friendly fixed-dose combination to treat TB, the result of a Unitaid partnership with the TB Alliance. Close to 700,000 children will get the treatment they need. “We now have a fixed dose combination for children that is used all over the world,” he said.

In an article published earlier today, Marmora and Partners In Health (PIH) co-founder Dr. Paul Farmer pointed out that new medications for multidrug-resistant TB (MDR-TB) are reaching only a tiny fraction of the people who need them, due in part to the exceptionally high cost of treatment. As a result, the number of new TB cases is falling very slowly—by less than 2 percent each year.

Marmora and Farmer said the UNGA’s decision to host the high-level meeting on TB is a sign that the tide could finally be turning. Funded by Unitaid, Partners In Health leads the endTB project, which is piloting the first new TB drugs in more than 40 years, bedaquiline and delamanid. EndTB’s shorter, less-toxic treatment regimens for MDR-TB, which are simpler to administer, have the potential to bring about major public health gains.

Unitaid’s approach makes it possible to introduce very expensive treatments at prices that are affordable in low-income countries. The organization’s experience with diverse partners has shown that medicines and other tools that may have cost large sums to develop can be made available on a very wide scale to those most in need.

Responding to a global TB crisis and the growing menace of drug-resistant forms of the disease, Unitaid expanded its funding for innovative TB projects from US$ 127 million in 2016 to US$ 215 million in 2018. Unitaid’s TB funding is on track to hit US$ 300 million in 2020.

Further investments are in development: new Unitaid projects will fight TB and its drug-resistant strains through innovative diagnostics, wider use of the best new drugs for adults and children, and new technologies to support people in taking their medicines.

In 2017, 10 million people fell ill with TB, according to the World Health Organization, and 1.6 million died from the disease. More than 95 percent of TB deaths occur in low- and middle-income countries. TB is a leading killer of HIV-positive people. In 2016, 40 percent of HIV deaths were caused by TB.

Unitaid ranked as one of the world’s leaders in funding tuberculosis R&D

Geneva – A newly released ranking names Unitaid as the world’s largest multilateral funder of tuberculosis research and development, and fourth largest funder overall, a reflection of Unitaid’s intensified investment to confront the world’s leading infectious killer. 

The ranking, compiled annually by the Treatment Action Group (TAG), shows that Unitaid jumped from the 9th largest TB research and development funder to the fourth from 2016 to 2017. 

Responding to a global TB crisis and the growing menace of drug-resistant forms of the disease, Unitaid expanded its funding for innovative TB projects from US$ 127 million in 2016 to US$ 215 million in 2018. Unitaid’s TB funding is on track to hit US$ 300 million in 2020. 

Unitaid’s projects harness innovation to improve preventive treatment, diagnostics and better, faster-acting treatments, setting them up for wide-scale introduction by funding partners. Unitaid today announced a major extension to endTB, an US$ 81 million research project into better, shorter, less-toxic treatment regimens for multidrug-resistant TB, led by Partners In Health. 

In 2017, 10 million people fell ill with TB, according to the World Health Organization, and 1.6 million died from the disease. More than 95 percent of TB deaths occur in low- and middle-income countries. TB is a leading killer of HIV-positive people. In 2016, 40 percent of HIV deaths were caused by TB. 

New York-based TAG has tracked global funding for TB research and development since 2005, using an electronic survey of public, private, philanthropic, and multilateral organizations.

Unitaid extends key research grant as part of a strong counterattack on tuberculosis

New York – Unitaid is intensifying its commitment to fighting tuberculosis with a US$ 21 million investment in extending endTB, a global research project that is improving treatment regimens for patients with multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB).

Led by Partners In Health, in partnership with Médecins sans Frontières and Interactive Research & Development, endTB has been piloting two new medicines, bedaquiline and delamanid, in 17 countries, that aim to make treatment for MDR-TB shorter, simpler, more effective, and with fewer side effects.

The ultimate goal of the endTB project is to provide countries and funding agencies, such as the Global Fund, with effective drugs that can be introduced on a massive scale to tackle MDR-TB, a virulent form of TB.

“Unitaid’s visionary investment is a brilliant and strategic approach to ‘double down’ on this critical work,” said Gary Gottlieb, CEO of Partners In Health. “An expanded and extended endTB will further pave the way to ending the scourge of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis and improving and saving the lives of countless deserving people.”

The endTB project’s original term was 2015-2019 and its budget US$ 60 million, but with the extension it will run through the end of 2022, with Unitaid support of up to US$ 81 million.

Unitaid’s growing, varied slate of TB investments makes it, as of 2018, the world’s largest multilateral actor to invest in TB research and development. Our active TB portfolio includes grants worth US$ 215 million that are designed to speed access to innovative solutions for latent, drug-resistant and childhood TB. And the TB grant portfolio is expected to reach US$ 300 million by 2020.

Long-used treatments for MDR-TB can take up to two years, succeed in only about half the cases, and can cause major side effects such as hearing loss and psychosis.

People with MDR-TB have a form of the illness that does not respond to multiple first-line TB drugs. With endTB’s extension, a new clinical trial will be added to develop a treatment regimen for patients with fluoroquinolone-resistant MDR-TB.

“We are proud to be deepening our commitment to endTB, a highly ambitious project with the potential to have a huge impact on the trajectory of drug-resistant forms of TB,” said Unitaid’s Executive Director, Lelio Marmora.

EndTB’s innovative treatment regimens have the potential to bring about significant public health gains. According to project estimates, the new treatments could cure 119,000 more patients, save 56,000 more lives and avert 239,000 drug-resistant infections from 2019 to 2027.

The endTB extension is among recent initiatives Unitaid has undertaken to fight back against TB, the world’s leading infectious killer. More than half a million people get MDR-TB every year and 200,000 die of it.

Further investments are in development: new Unitaid projects will fight TB and its drug-resistant strains through innovative diagnostics, wider use of the best new drugs for adults and children, and new technologies to support people in taking their medicines.

Impact story: Expanding access to next generation drug-resistant tuberculosis treatment

Impact story: Improving use of tuberculosis diagnostics