Who Coordinated Scientific Advice Procedure For Health Product Research And Development

The WHO Coordinated Scientific Advice Procedure for health product R&D (CSA) represents a WHO corporate platform for interaction between health product developers and the relevant technical department(s) and the Prequalification team within WHO. The goal of the CSA procedure is to provide advice to product developers on the generation of robust data for future evaluation towards a WHO policy recommendation and product prequalification in areas of unmet public health needs

Preferred product characteristics (PPCs) are key tools to incentivize and guide the development of urgently needed health products. The PPCs published here aim to articulate the public health need, preferred characteristics, and clinical development considerations for monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) for malaria prevention. Alongside the development of new malaria vaccines and chemoprevention drugs, there have been recent R&D advances in the development of mAbs for malaria prevention. Passive immunization with mAbs through direct administration of functional antibodies could potentially overcome some of the limitations of vaccines by providing immediate protection. Furthermore, mAbs with simplified dose regimens could potentially circumvent some of the coverage and adherence issues faced by malaria chemoprevention. To support this quickly developing R&D area, WHO convened a scientific development group to consider the PPCs for mAbs to be used for malaria prevention, with a focus on the reduction of morbidity and mortality in infants and children due to Plasmodium falciparum.

Preferred product characteristics” (PPCs) are key tools to incentivize and guide the development of urgently needed health products. The PPCs published here aim to articulate the public health need, preferred characteristics, and clinical development considerations for drugs for malaria chemoprevention. WHO recommends several chemoprevention strategies for malaria control, including seasonal malaria chemoprevention, perennial malaria chemoprevention, intermittent preventive treatment of malaria in pregnancy, and mass drug administration. These strategies face a number of challenges such as suboptimal adherence and coverage and the emergence and spread of drug resistance. This document presents PPCs for the development of drugs for malaria chemoprevention in children, in pregnancy and in non-immune travellers, and outlines potential clinical development approaches, including the repurposing of approved malaria treatments for use as chemoprevention, recombining approved individual drugs into new combinations for malaria prevention, and the development of new drug combinations specifically for chemoprevention.

Rare diseases collectively affect millions of Americans of all ages, but developing drugs and medical devices to prevent, diagnose, and treat these conditions is challenging. The Institute of Medicine (IOM) recommends implementing an integrated national strategy to promote rare diseases research and product development.

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