A celebration of LONGEVITY’s research partners

Posted on: 22 August 2024 by Rebecca Derrick in LONGEVITY Blog

In April for World Health Day, we highlighted the LONGEVITY partners and their commitment to equitable healthcare access. This will always be at the heart of all of LONGEVITY’s work, and we want to highlight the underpinning health research, specifically in medicine development. We thought it was a good time to spotlight the importance of LONGEVITY’s research partners as an example of how the Centre of Excellence for Long-acting Therapeutics (CELT) works collaboratively to reach our goals in global health.

What is CELT’s link to health research?

One element of CELT’s work is the creation of safe and effective long-acting medicines for prevention and treatment of diseases. One of CELT’s main projects is the LONGEVITY project, funded by global health agency Unitaid. LONGEVITY focuses specifically on creating long-acting medicines for malaria, tuberculosis (TB) and hepatitis C virus (HCV) for deployment in low- and middle- income countries (LMICs).

While some of these diseases are widespread, their most devastating effects disproportionately impact LMICs. Each of these three diseases is either preventable or treatable, so the fact that the highest numbers of severe illnesses and deaths related to them are in LMICs means that current preventative and curative methods aren’t being as effective as they could be there. There are many reasons for this, such as access issues, bureaucracy and practicality of the dosing regimens; for example, an 8-week course of oral tablets for HCV treatment would require 168 doses. The LONGEVITY project strives to bring forward long-acting formulations requiring just one dose of medication lasting several months, simplifying treatment for people suffering from the disease.

How is CELT championing health research?

CELT is a cross-faculty team made up of several disciplines. Sometimes, drugs that already exist can be transformed into new long-acting formulations using our pharmaceutical technologies, and our pharmacology modelling team work hard to identify drugs with the properties compatible for this.  CELT’s chemistry and pharmacology teams work hard to design, manufacture and preclinically evaluate long-acting medicine options, and then work collaboratively with National and International partners to translate them further towards clinical use.

The LONGEVITY project is a consortium of different members and partners, who all bring specialist knowledge, to make sure these long-acting medicines are thoroughly evaluated to maximise the potential to reach the LMIC communities who will benefit from them. A large part of our work is focused on understanding the needs and attitudes of healthcare providers and patients to ensure our research is aligned to the needs of the community. We previously wrote a blog about the organisations within LONGEVITY whose work also revolves around creating equitable access conditions through licensing, outreach, etc. and you can read that blog here, but our blog today is to celebrate the teams involved explicitly in the fundamental research and development.

Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine

While being a private research university with a focus on education, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine (JHU) is also a research institution with 902 laboratories. They practice patient-centred medicine through the study of disease prevention and treatment to facilitate excellent health care delivery.

Their mission hinges on identifying and answering questions not only in the treatment and prevention of diseases, but also in the mechanisms of diseases and in health care delivery.

JHU and CELT, with strong support from the Clinton Health Access Initiative and Medicines Patent Pool, are collaborating through the LONGEVITY project to evaluate long-acting medicines for HCV in early-stage clinical trials. JHU have world-leading clinical expertise spanning clinical pharmacology to medical chemistry. Once CELT’s preclinical research reaches proof of concept, then the next stages are clinical trials using human volunteers. This will be a critical step to evaluate success or failure, so JHU brings critical expertise to LONGEVITY.

JHU also have state-of-the-art disease models that they are deployed to understand the effectiveness of the LONGEVITY long-acting medicines for tuberculosis and we are thrilled to highlight them as a key partner.

Queen’s University Belfast

Queen’s University Belfast (QUB) is a research-intensive Russell Group university, so has a large focus on their research output as well as educational infrastructure. CELT has strong ties to QUB’s School of Pharmacy who are number 2 for Pharmacy and Pharmacology in the UK’s 2024 Complete University Guide, and they are a key team within LONGEVITY’s research.

Their commitment to research focuses on pioneering patient-focused work, using their pharmaceutical science and practice knowledge, including drug delivery and biomaterials, to make real world improvements for patients.

CELT and QUB have started to collaborate on the LONGEVITY project specifically to research and develop microarray patches for long-acting malaria and TB prevention in LMICs. This new drug delivery approach may have particular relevance to paediatric populations and could dramatically reduce the number of child deaths we see from malaria and TB in LMICs.

University of Nebraska Medical Centre

These principles of outreach are the basis of University of Nebraska Medical Centre’s (UNMC) role within LONGEVITY overseeing aspects of our community engagement. UNMC work with Treatment Action Group and CELT to survey the attitudes of LMIC healthcare providers and patients about long-acting medicines for prevention and treatment of the three key diseases within the LONGEVITY project. They were the leaders of the LONGEVITY article published in the Journal of Viral Hepatitis illustrating that doctors in LMICs support long-acting injectable options for HCV treatments. You can read our news article and find that publication here.

UNMC scientists and clinicians also provide critical insight into the research, development and clinical evaluation of long-acting medicines being conducted through the LONGEVITY project.

While on paper we’re all research institutions, our focuses and knowledge bases are highly complementary. Rather than releasing knowledge into the world and hoping it is picked up by someone like minded, collaborating with teams who include the full array of knowledge needed for completion is key. LONGEVITY is a sum of its parts and the research, development, community outreach, licensing and commercialisation teams are all necessary to realise the potential of our work.

Ensuring these medications, that we hope can have a significant impact in reducing malaria, TB and HCV related deaths, are accessible to the people in the LMICs that need them most requires the dedication and tenacity of all of LONGEVITY’s partners. Collaboration as the foundation of the LONGEVITY project is paramount to its success, and how the consortium is working together inspires us every day.

The LONGEVITY project aims to simplify TB, malaria and hepatitis c virus treatment and preventative treatment to reduce the drug burden and the number of patients requiring complex therapies for active disease.

Find out more about the LONGEVITY project

The LONGEVITY Project is funded by global health agency Unitaid

The project also involves critical partners and collaborators in the Clinton Health Access Initiative, Johns Hopkins University, Medicines Patent Pool, Tandem Nano Ltd., Treatment Action Group and the University of Nebraska Medical Center