University of Liverpool awarded £24m to develop long-acting medicines for deadly diseases

The University of Liverpool has been awarded over £24 million for a project that aims to develop new medicines for diseases affecting low-and middle-income countries (LMICs).

The funding from the global health initiative Unitaid will go towards the university’s Longevity project, which was started to develop medicines for malaria and tuberculosis (TB), as well as a single-injection cure for hepatitis C (HCV).

It’s estimated that 90% of malaria infections and deaths, 95% of TB infections and deaths, as well as 75% of people living with HCV live in LMICs. Overall, it’s thought that 300 million people live with these diseases and over 2 million deaths occur in these regions.

The Longevity project will attempt to transform current treatments that exist in pill forms, into long-acting injectables that need to be taken less often. The hope is that repositioning existing drugs will save researchers time from creating fundamentally new medicines.

The project will use Solid Drug Nanoparticle (SDN) technology from the university’s spin-out Tandem Nano. The technology will support the development of formulations for the diseases, which can be dispersed as administrations as long acting injections.

A single injection is designed to gradually release drugs into the bloodstreams for as long as six months, forgoing the need to hand out hundreds of pills every year.

Project co-ordinator, professor Andrew Owen said: “Our project aims to develop revolutionary long-acting medicines for infectious diseases that have a major burden across low- and middle-income countries. Although drugs exist for malaria and TB prevention, and HCV therapy, they rely on individuals taking medication daily. Chronic oral dosing is extremely difficult to maintain over long periods leading to non-adherence that can negatively impact efficacy and exacerbate emergence of antimicrobial resistance.

“This research seeks to remove the need for daily tablets and generate long-acting dosing technologies able to provide therapeutic drug concentrations for months after a single administration. We hope to provide clinically-relevant interventions that could ultimately impact large numbers of people and transmission of these diseases.”

The team at University of Liverpool will also establish a Centre of Excellence in Long-acting Therapeutics (CELT) to help spread a broad understanding of the technologies being used.

Kate Hencher, a Unitaid program manager involved in the new project, said: “Long-acting technologies hold the potential for greatly improving patients’ adherence, which should lead to a greater number of successful treatments, less spread of diseases and fewer preventable deaths.

“Also, from a supply-chain perspective, it’s super exciting. Instead of bottles and bottles and bottles and bottles of pills, you would have a box load of injections, and then, somewhere down the line you might be replacing that with a little box of plasters that could be a three-month’ supply of HIV treatments for an entire community. That’s where this is going. That’s how big it is.”