Coalition Ethics Working Group members Ms Katharine Wright and Dr Leonardo de Castro recently participated in the 14th Annual Philippines Health Research Week under the theme ‘Health R&D in the New Normal: Moving Towards Universal Health Care’. A key outcome of the meeting was the adoption of the Ethical Compass as a guide for Research Ethics Committee processes in the Philippines.

Building on concerns of low access to and availability of diagnostics for COVID-19 in resource-limited settings, a survey was carried out to provide initial insight into the country-specific landscape of diagnostics. This survey report highlights the current tests available in different countries, obstacles to access and availability of diagnostics, as well as possible solutions to the identified obstacles as perceived by respondents.  

Coalition member and co-founder DNDi has just issued a policy report, ‘Another triumph of science, but defeat for access? Ensuring innovation and equitable access for COVID-19 treatments, other infectious diseases, and future pandemics’.  The report urges the international community to learn the early lessons – and avoid repeating the mistakes – of the past year when it comes to innovation of and access to COVID-19 therapeutics, a deeply neglected area within the COVID-19 response.

Dr Brenda Okware, Scientific Coordinator of the COVID-19 Clinical Research Coalition, was recently featured on Canada's Most Listened-to Radio Program, The Current hosted by Matt Galloway on CBC Radio. She discussed recent COVID-19 developments in Uganda as well as equitable access to vaccines in low- and middle-income countries.

PLATCOV is a phase 2 platform study assessing antivirals in early COVID-19 disease. It is looking for sites to be able to rapidly set up and recruit into this platform trial within 4 months, for an 18 month period. The study is run out of the Mahidol Oxford Tropical Medicine Research Unit in Bangkok, Thailand, led by Professor Sir Nicholas White and sponsored by the University of Oxford. The study has funding and is ready to begin.

Group of emergency physicians advocates rapid and simple measures to reduce medical oxygen wastage in crisis context of insufficient oxygen.

An article published today in The Lancet calls for urgent collaboration and coordination for unmet, underfunded COVID-19 research priorities in low-resource settings.

A letter was published this week in The Lancet by four authors who are members of the COVID-19 Clinical Research Coalition. Prof. Nick White, Dr Nathalie Strub-Wourgaft, Prof. Abul Faiz, and Prof. Philippe Guérin make the case that assessments of drug efficacy in preventing COVID-19 and treating uncomplicated COVID-19 should not be based on data pooled with the treatment results of severely ill patients. The authors, who are also members of the coalition’s Steering Committee, note that studies to date have found major differences in therapeutic responses according to disease stage.

The Medicine Quality Research Group has published a new Medical Product Quality Report focusing on increasing issues around substandard and falsified COVID-19 vaccines. With the implementation of the key innovations of COVID-19 vaccines, there have been growing numbers of reports of SF vaccines in the public domain. Given the vital role they will play in ending the pandemic and protecting the global population but severe issues with equitable access, SF vaccines are highly likely to be a growing problem.

The COVID-19 Clinical Research Coalition is working with the ACT-Accelerator Therapeutics Partnership to increase the representation of researchers from low- and middle-income countries in the Therapeutics Partnership’s workstreams. We are seeking researchers with relevant research expertise, technical competence, a commitment to the principles of equitable access for all, and a desire to represent the research priorities of low-resource settings in these workstreams.