UNITE4TB Annual Meeting 2024

UGC-Head Professor Michael Hoelscher is the scientific leader of UNITE4TB, the largest public-private partnership in TB drug development in the history of the European Union.

The three days in Uppsala kicked off on the 15 May with a joint symposium with fellow IHI AMR Accelerator Consortium ERA4TB. The full-day meeting brought together both Consortia to strengthen collaboration and address the status and future of treatments for tuberculosis. In-depth discussions were held on topics covered by both consortia, from biomarkers and model-informed pre-clinical and clinical drug development to datasets and data management.

Community Engagement was a core focus of the symposium with a session on public participation and input along the drug development pipeline, featuring several members of UNITE4TB’s Community Advisory Group (CAG).

“Meaningful engagement is a win-win for all. It moves the narrative beyond affected communities simply being the recipients of care. Better understanding equals better buy-in from the community,” said Blessi Kumar, UNITE4TB CAG member.

Day 1 opened with a presentation by Tek-Ang Lim (Scientific Officer at Innovative Health Initiative (IHI)) who spoke on maximizing UNITE4TB’s impact. In addition to updates from all 12 Work Packages, there were break-out sessions, including one on how to ensure equitable access to UNITE4TB innovations with speakers from the World Health Organization (WHO), the European Medicines Agency, TB Alliance, and the Global Drug Facility.

Day 1 of the Annual Meeting closed with a presentation by keynote speaker, Rada Savic of the University of California, San Francisco, who spoke on intelligence for accelerating and de-risking TB regimen development. A key question posed was how we treat hard-to-treat patients and derisk this in clinical trials.

“All novel drugs, if safe and tolerable, should have a path to the market. Not all options need to be ultra-short treatment regimens,” she said.

Day 2 of the Annual Meeting was opened once more by Tek-Ang Lim of IHI, followed by updates from the Scientific, Ethics, and Community Advisory Boards and our Young Investigators Group with an insightful panel discussion on how best to involve young researchers in the Consortium and create a mutual learning environment.

The final session of our 2024 Annual Meeting was a panel discussion about responding to the emerging threat of bedaquiline resistance, with speakers from TASK, the Institute of Tropical Medicine Antwerp, Johnson & Johnson, as well as the TB Unit Lead of the WHO Regional Office for Europe, Askar Yedilbayev.

Closing the meeting, Derek Sloan (Radboudumc), UNITE4TBs new project lead, thanked everyone for their participation and contributions. He noted how promising it is to see how well the project is progressing:

“The past three days, starting with the symposium with ERA4TB, provided thought-provoking scientific discussions with a true spirit of joint engagement. UNITE4TB is continuing to build its engine. Our challenge in the coming years is to fully construct this engine and keep working in a balanced way that makes full use of the multi-disciplinary skillset of the consortium. Together, we will continue to move forward.”