Active Public Health & Healthcare

Building a coordinated and sustainable SBE research and development ecosystem

Funder Wellcome Charity-funded
Associated organisations Avenir Health · Drugs for Neglected Diseases initiative (DNDi) · Florida Gulf Coast University · Impact Global Health · Reeves Branding · Uniting to Combat Neglected Tropical Diseases · VenomAid Diagnostics Europe PMC affiliations are not treated as award recipients or mapped locations.
Funding £3.1M
Period Nov 2025 — Jun 2028

In plain English

AI plain-English summary

Snakebite researchers, funders, and advocates are scattered across different organisations with no shared plan, and a consortium is now stepping in to coordinate them. This matters because snakebite envenoming kills tens of thousands of people each year, mostly in rural tropical regions, yet the field remains fragmented and chronically underfunded. Promising treatments and antivenoms exist in research pipelines but rarely reach the people who need them. The consortium—led by Impact Global Health—aims to bridge the gap between science and policy by tackling five specific obstacles: deciding which pipeline candidates to prioritise, calculating the economic and health returns of investment, building a shared vision through strategic communications, creating a formal coordination mechanism for funders and researchers, and securing long-term funding to push innovations to market. If this succeeds, the snakebite R&D community could shift from a collection of isolated projects into a mature, coordinated ecosystem. That would mean fewer promising treatments stalling before they reach clinics, and a sustained pipeline of affordable antivenoms and therapies reaching the remote communities that currently lack them. The work targets the invisible infrastructure of research governance—funding flows, priority-setting, and collaboration—rather than any single scientific breakthrough.

View original technical description
While significant progress has been made in snakebite envenoming (SBE) R&D in recent years, the community remains fragmented and underfunded. The vision of a coordinated sector with common goals, priorities and funding to push innovations to market remains unfulfilled. Impact Global Health and consortium partners will provide independent leadership and skills to bridge the science- policy divide and realise this vision, leveraging combined expertise in R&D, advocacy, communications, and resource mobilisation to drive the SBE agenda forward.The consortium has identified five objectives needed to transform the SBE R&D community into a coordinated, mature ecosystem able to fund and sustain momentum to drive promising innovations to market: O1. Prioritise candidates in the pipeline to inform funding and research decisions.O2. Demonstrate health and economic impacts, benefits and societal return of investing in SBE R&D.O3. Articulate and build commitment to a mature SBE R&D ecosystem through strategic communications.O4. Bring together funders and researchers to collaborate via a new coordination mechanism. O5. Seek sustainable funding for SBE R&D to drive translation of promising candidates to market through multi-stakeholder engagement.The consortium will deliver end-to-end work packages tackling the scientific and ecosystem needs of the sector, and sustaining momentum in this space.

View the original record at the funder ↗

Researchers

Andrew Durso (EPMC Awardee)Céline Aerts (EPMC Awardee)Harriet Bell (EPMC Awardee)Isabela Ribeiro (EPMC Awardee)Jonas Jürgensen-Breum (EPMC Awardee)Juliette Borri (EPMC Awardee)Lindsay Keir (EPMC Awardee)Michelle Weinberger (EPMC Awardee)Paula Reeves (EPMC Awardee)Sabastine Wakdok (EPMC Awardee)Stuart Halford (EPMC Awardee)

Related Research

Grants with similar aims, by meaning.

Snakebite Research Alliance- Initial Activities
Launching the WHO Snakebite Envenoming Roadmap
Developing Snakebite Research Hubs- Improving Evidence based decision making in Snakebite in Africa
Implementation of a culturally tailored decentralization programme for snakebite treatment in indigenous communities in the brazilian amazonia
African Snakebite Alliance

Original classification

Discretionary Award

Plain English summaries and category classifications on this site are generated by AI and may not perfectly reflect the original research.