Developing new medicine for pregnancy-related conditions affecting women in low and middle-income countries

An estimated 295,000 maternal deaths occur globally each year, most of which are preventable. The lack of medicines specifically developed for obstetric conditions is a major barrier to reducing maternal mortality.

There have only ever been two medicines specifically developed for pregnancy-related conditions, the most recent of which was registered in the 1990s. A major factor is that development of new medicines is often driven by discoveries in the laboratory, with little consideration for the real-world needs of women and healthcare providers. An ‘end-to-end’ approach considers how medicine research and development can be targeted to meet these real-world needs.

End-to-end thinking can be achieved by pre-identifying the characteristics that new medicines should take to address unmet clinical needs before development begins. While this sort of innovative thinking has been used by the World Health Organization to successfully drive the development of new vaccines, there has been little strategic coordination to apply this approach to pregnancy-related conditions. This project involves building an evidence-based approach to guiding development of new maternal medicines for global use.

In this project, we will assess and synthesise research on the design and development of new medicines for use in pregnancy, develop a methodological framework for pre-identifying advances needed to improve maternal health, and develop new profiles for innovative medicines. The project will involve the use of qualitative and quantitative methods, and for PhD students, would be appropriate for a PhD by peer-review publications.