There are currently no proven vaccines or drugs to prevent COVID-19. In this BBC World News interview, MORU\u2019s Prof Sir Nick White explains why the only way to find out if chloroquine and hydroxychloriquine work against COVID-19 is via randomised, clinical trials and how the hype over chloroquine negatively affects people with lupus and rheumatoid arthritis.
Researchers at MORU and two institutions in the US (University of Washington and La Jolla Institute for Immunology) receive grants from the COVID-19 Therapeutics Accelerator, a large-scale initiative launched by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Wellcome, and Mastercard to speed the development of and access to therapies for COVID-19.
The problem of substandard and falsified (SF) medical products affects all countries but few regulatory authorities or pharmaceutical companies have policies of publicly releasing data. As a first step in tracking this global issue, IDDO\u2019s Medicine Quality Research Group, with the MORU Tropical Health Network and supported by a grant from the Wellcome Trust, has today launched a new, free-to-use, online tool, the Medicine Quality Monitoring Globe, (MQM Globe) which maps SF news reports worldwide in real time.
Adding a third anti-malaria drug to current artemisinin-combination therapies (ACTs) provides effective treatment against multidrug-resistant falciparum malaria in Southeast Asia, say Oxford researchers in a study in The Lancet. Using TACTs should extend current malaria drugs so drug-resistant malaria doesn't kill millions more and derail hopes of controlling and eliminating malaria.
When we are ill, we expect our medicines to work as intended. But what if they do not contain the ingredients listed on the packaging? The Pharmacide Arts exhibition \u201cWhat\u2019s in your medicines?\u201d showcases the original artwork of 11 South East Asian artists. The exhibition is open to the public from 26th-28th January 2020 at the Mandarin Hotel, Bangkok, from 10 am \u2013 5 pm.
Professor Joel Tarning received a Bailey K. Ashford Medal at the ASTMH 2019 Conference. The medal is awarded annually for distinguished work in tropical medicine by an early- to mid-career ASMTH member. Joel is Head of Clinical Pharmacology at MORU and his work focuses on applying pharmacokinetic-phamacodynamic modelling to optimise antimalarial drug therapies, in particular for at-risk groups such as malnourished children and pregnant women.
Noting that substandard and falsified medical products (including medicines, vaccines, biologics, and diagnostics) represent a significant and growing threat to human health, The Lancet Global Health published 'The Global access to quality-assured medical products: the Oxford Statement and call to action'. The Oxford Statement has been signed by 159 attendees at the 2018 Oxford Conference on Medicine Quality and Public Health from governments, multilateral agencies, academia and civil society.
When we are ill, we trust that the medicines that we take will make us feel and be better. But what if our pills do not contain the ingredients listed on the packaging? The art exhibition \u2018What\u2019s in your medicines?\u2019 explores how substandard and falsified (\u2018fake\u2019) medicines can affect our health, by showcasing the striking and original artwork of 12 South East Asian artists.
Oxford Medical Sciences Divisional Panel has conferred the title of Professor on three members of our Centre. Ben Cooper - Professor of Epidemiology, Sassy Molyneux - Professor of Global Health and Piero Olliaro - Professor of Poverty Related Infectious Diseases were awarded these titles in recognition of their distinction in their respective fields and contributions to the research, teaching and administration of the Department and we congratulate them on their success!
An individual patient data meta-analysis of 2,017 patients from 19 studies has found a high risk of recurrence following treatment of P. vivax malaria with artemether-lumefantrine (AL) and dihydroartemisinin-piperaquine (DP) unless they are co-administered with primaquine. The research supports recommendations that these artemisinin-based combination therapies (ACT) should be combined with primaquine.
MORU and SMRU were delighted and honoured to host the University of Oxford Vice-Chancellor Prof Louise Richardson and her party during her visit to Thailand on 1-4 September. Accompanying the Vice-Chancellor were Jeremy Woodall (Director of Development (Asia)), Frewyeni Kidane (Fundraiser for Southeast Asia), Cher Wu (Asia Development office) and Ed Gibbs (NDM Director of Finance and Operations).
In partnership with the Wellcome Innovations Flagship Programme, MORU launched its Critical Care Asia Network project with its first investigators\u2019 meeting on 19-20 Aug in Bangkok. The project will establish an Asian ICU network across 42 ICUs in nine countries and implement a setting-adapted electronic registry.
MORU researchers have found that severe malnutrition is associated with lower exposure to the antimalarial drug lumefantrine in children treated with artemether-lumefantrine, the most common treatment for uncomplicated falciparum malaria. The study, which is the first to specifically address this, calls urgently for further research into optimised dosing regimens for undernourished children.
The findings of two studies, published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases journal, reveal that by 2016\u20132018 malaria parasites resistant to both artemisinin and its widely used partner drug piperaquine represented more than 80% of the parasites circulating in northeast Thailand and Vietnam, despite having only emerged in western Cambodia in 2008.
A large clinical trial in Africa and Asia has shown that a 7 day course of high dose primaquine, a drug used to treat P. vivax malaria, is well tolerated and just as effective as the current standard 14 day regimen, according to a study published this week in The Lancet. These findings have important implications for the treatment and elimination of vivax malaria in the Asia Pacific.
Medical Action Myanmar and MOCRU health teams identified a number of children with rickets in remote areas of Myanmar. MOCRU director Frank Smithuis presented the findings of clinical screening to the Minister of Health, alongside treatment results and a plan for a large survey to investigate the prevalence of vitamin D deficiency and its underlying causes.
A project using drama that engages with village communities in Cambodia, led by Professor Phaik Yeong Cheah of the Mahidol Oxford Tropical Medicine Research Unit and Nuffield Department of Medicine, has won a Project award in this year\u2019s Vice-Chancellor\u2019s Public Engagement with Research Awards. The project also won the Vice-Chancellor\u2019s Choice Award for Public Engagement with Research.
New research by Makoto Saito and colleagues at SMRU found that a longer follow-up is required to assess antimalarial drug efficacy in pregnant women. This was found across all drugs assessed in low malaria transmission settings. The report\u2019s authors have called for guidelines specifically for pregnant women and further investigation of optimal follow-up periods in high malaria transmission settings.
A ground-breaking study in Bangladesh co-lead by MORU has found that using data from mobile phone networks to track the movement of people across the country can help predict where outbreaks of diseases such as malaria are likely to occur, enabling health authorities to take preventative measures.
MORU, SMRU and FilmAid Foundation invite you to the Bangkok Premiere of Under the Mask on the 17th June. This drama film is based on real testimonies of TB patients. The story follows the lives of our characters as they journey from diagnosis to treatment and help from the SMRU TB team, and explores how each discovers their capacity to overcome the deadly disease and share their knowledge and experience with others. Made in the local language, this film provides an engaging and inspiring tool for raising TB awareness in the community.
This year, the Pint of Science festival in Thailand is in not one but two cities! Join us in Bangkok at WeLearn on 21st-22nd May, and at Hungry Wolf's in Chiang Rai on 25th May.
The 5th May is World Hand Hygiene Day. To raise awareness among staff and the Thai-Myanmar border populations of the importance of hand washing, a simple, proven effective way of infection prevention, the SMRU infection control committee worked with the SMRU clinics and Mae Sot lab staff to create this fantastic video.
How to change urban Myanmar communities' antibiotics usage habits? Check out 'Fever and Antibiotic Use', a Wellcome-funded community theatre initiative by MOCRU Research Coordinator Dr Myo Maung Maung Swe. Myo uses forum theatre to engage Yangon residents in a lively manner so they can learn when to use antibiotics \u2013 or not.
This 5-day course is aimed at participants with a basic understanding of infectious disease modelling and an aptitude for the R programming language. On completion participants will be able to write and analyse the dynamics of a simple mathematical model and use it to consider cost and intervention scenarios. September 23-27 at St Anne\u2019s College, Oxford
To mark World Malaria Day on 25 April WWARN\u2019s Dr Makoto Saito and Professor Joel Tarning from the Mahidol Oxford Tropical Medicine Research Unit and Head of WWARN Pharmacometrics presented their work on prevention and treatment of malaria in vulnerable groups at a seminar hosted by the Centre for Tropical Medicine and Global Health
Increased funding is needed to eliminate malaria across 22 Asia-Pacific countries and save an estimated 400,000 lives, according to research published in a new collection of studies on Wellcome Open Research.
How do you go about building all the skills you need at the start of your research career? Cherry Lim from our MORU unit in Bangkok, Thailand, was lucky to find a good mentor who guided her through this journey, but her own ceaseless curiosity and excitement about research were also important.
Rob van der Pluijm presented encouraging findings from TRAC II trial analyses of Triple Artemisinin Combination Therapies to the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Malaria & NTDs on March 19th in Westminster at the Houses of Parliament.
Lorenz Von Seidlein tells SciDev.Net that mass drug administration as \u201cpresumptive treatment\u201d to clear the parasite reservoir was carried out in eight villages spread across Cambodia, Lao PDR, Myanmar and Vietnam. By the third month, the prevalence of P. falciparum had decreased by 92 % in those villages. Over the subsequent nine months, P. falciparum infections returned but stayed well below baseline levels, showing that MDA can stop transmission of falciparum malaria and reduce its prevalence in SE Asia, where resistance to artemisinin has hampered elimination efforts.
Working closely with the University of British Columbia (UBC)'s Support Program to Advance Research Capacity (SPARC), MORU Malaria Researcher Dr Katherine Plewes was recently awarded a 3-year, C$971,551 grant for her study on Evaluating the renoprotective effect of acetaminophen in pediatric severe falciparum malaria: A randomized controlled trial.
On 12 Feb 2019, Professor Arjen Dondorp published a new book: Sepsis Management in Resource-limited Settings. The result of a 3-year project led by MORU and the European Society of Intensive Care Medicine (ESICM), the book was written by critical care physicians from around the globe.
On 24-25 Jan 2019, investigators met in Bangkok to launch the Developing Triple Artemisinin-based Combination Therapies (DeTACT) Project. Led by MORU and funded by UKaid and the UK Department for International Development (DfID), DeTACT is a large, 14 site trial in 8 African and 5 Asian countries that will study the efficacy, safety and tolerability of two Triple Artemisinin Combination Therapy (TACT) combinations, using combinations of existing antimalarial drugs.
Malaria causes nearly half a million deaths worldwide every year. Ninety percent of them are in sub-Saharan Africa, where poor infrastructure limits delivery of drugs. But now there is worry that those drugs are losing effectiveness as disease strains become resistant. PBS News Hour special correspondent Fred de Sam Lazaro reports from Cambodia, where scientists are researching and tracking new outbreaks.
An inspiring doctor and scientist of great compassion and intellect, Sir David Weatherall died 8 Dec 2018. A Nuffield Professor of Medicine, founder of the MRC Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine and a member of Wellcome\u2019s Board throughout the 1990s, Sir David was instrumental in the creation of MORU back in 1979.
This article, written by Professor Nick Day at MORU and published in the November 2018 issue of the Oxford Alumni Newsletter, describes in a nutshell all the good work our Centre is doing to promote Global Oxford.
Over 200 delegates travelled from more than 50 countries to attend the first ever conference on Medicine Quality and Public Health (MQPH 2018) in Oxford from 23-28 Sept. The conference, at Keble College, brought together experts in pharmacy, public health, chemistry, law, sociology, governance and ethics, from medicines regulatory authorities, academia, pharmaceutical industry, NGOs, and international organisations.
Progress against malaria has stalled, and the disease remains a significant threat to billions of people despite the expensive, decades-long efforts to contain it. In an encouraging development, MORU reported complete success in curing hundreds of patients in Southeast Asia with new three-drug combinations mixing fast-acting artemisinin with two longer-lasting drugs. It it hoped that triple therapy should become the standard for malaria treatment.
A systematic review analyses the results of 177 trials conducted between 1982 and 2016, including 18,436 patients who underwent electrocardiographic evaluation during malaria clinical trials. Nick White and colleagues found that serious cardiovascular side effects, which include sudden cardiac death, are very rare in the treatment of malaria with quinoline antimalarials. The work emphasises the importance of continued pharmacovigilance with the increasing use of quinoline antimalarials in mass treatment strategies such as intermittent preventative treatment and mass drug administration.
The incidence of malaria has continued to drop dramatically in remote rural villages in Myanmar after community workers trained only to detect and treat malaria began providing basic health care as well as malaria services, researchers affiliated with MOCRU, our Myanmar-Oxford Clinical Research Unit, have said.
The manufacture and distribution of medicines is a global industry, tainted by fake and substandard products. Not only might these drugs not work as expected, but some are even contributing to antimicrobial resistance. So, what\u2019s in your medicine cabinet? This is an article on Mosaic, a Wellcome publication
Every person has the right to expect that when they use a medical product, whether medicine, vaccine or diagnostic kit, it works. But too often, that is not the case. Substandard medical products result from errors, negligence or poor practice in manufacturing, transportation and/or storage. In contrast, falsified products result from criminal fraud. Both innovative and generic products are affected.
Over 200 delegates traveled from more than 50 countries to attend the first ever conference on Medicine Quality and Public Health (MQPH) in Oxford from 23-28 September 2018. The conference brought together experts from academia, public health, pharmacy, chemistry, law, ethics, social sciences, public engagement, health policy, with national medicines regulatory authorities, NGOs, international organizations and donors. Conference partners presented the latest evidence on substandard, falsified and unregulated medicines, and discussed strategies to tackle this global challenge.
CTMGH have been nominated for the Market Research Society President's Medal, awarded annually to an organisation that conduct extraordinary research but who might not be recognised through the usual channels. Our Centre is noted for its ingenious use of freely available online satellite images to gath data on the use of antibiotics in unmapped and inaccessible villages in rural Thailand and Laos. Researchers use the images to identify representative clusters of potential participants.
The incidence of malaria cases continued to drop dramatically in rural and remote Myanmar villages after community workers trained only to detect and treat malaria began providing basic health care as well as malaria services. Adding the health services to malaria control benefitted the villagers access to health and improved malaria services \u2013 paving the way for malaria elimination.
Come and meet us at the ASTMH conference, to enjoy science over a pint and bite to eat: Outbreaks, from Ebola to Zika on Mon 29th Oct. Mosquitoes, the most dangerous animals in the world on Tue 30th. Global health terror night: bats, mites and other creepy crawlies on Wed 31st. We will be at The Vintage, 3121 Magazine St, New Orleans, 7-9pm
Dr Myo Maung Maung Swe and Htet Htet Aung from our MOCRU unit in Myanmar were awarded grants by the International Society for Infectious Diseases and Wellcome. Myo Maung will study antibiotics use and antimicrobial resistance public awareness in Myanmar; Htet Htet will conduct a study on Ethical challenges when offering pregnant women with Hepatitis B short course treatment to prevent transmission.
A pioneering academic conference will bring together, for the first time, people from all over the world dealing with the problem of poor quality medicines and their impact on public health. The Medicine Quality & Public Health conference will take place at Keble College, Oxford, 23-28 Sept 2018. It will provide a unique opportunity for health authorities, scientists, pharmacists, lawyers and international organisations to discuss the problem and outline the necessary steps to tackle the issue on a global scale.
A team of researchers led by Yoel Lubell at MORU and IDDO used data from the USA and Thailand to link the consumption of antibiotics with the direct and indirect costs of treating patients for five drug-resistant bacterial infections.
Scientists are racing to stamp out the disease in Southeast Asia before unstoppable strains spread. This article features MORU, SMRU and colleagues, and explains what is happening and what we are doing to eliminate drug-resistant malaria in Southeast Asia before it spreads
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