What is the name of your organization?
Partners in Health Research and Development, Centre for Clinical Research, Kenya Medical Research Institute
What is the name of your solution?
Clima-Aware
Provide a one-line summary or tagline for your solution.
Clima-Aware leverages real-time data and geospatial technology to map substandard & falsified access antibiotics in Kenya zoned by climatic conditions
In what city, town, or region is your solution team headquartered?
Nairobi, Kenya
In what country is your solution team headquartered?
Kenya
What type of organization is your solution team?
Other, including part of a larger organization (please explain below)
If you selected Other, please explain here.
Partners in Health Research and Development is a research organization affiliated with
Centre for Clinical Research, Kenya Medical Research Institute
Film your elevator pitch.
What specific problem are you solving?
Substandard and falsified medicines is a global health challenge, with low- & middle-income countries disproportionately affected. In Kenya, national post-marketing surveillance efforts have focused on programme-affiliated medicines such as those used for malaria, human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), tuberculosis, and maternal, neonatal, and child health (MNCH). There is a paucity of national data on the quality of antibiotics, with limited studies carried out primarily in the capital city, Nairobi, unduly excluding other cities, peri-urban, and rural populations.
Kenya has six climatic zones with characteristics ranging from arid, semi-arid, semi-humid to humid. These climatic zones manifest differences in patterns of temperature, humidity, rainfall, and extreme weather events such as droughts and floods. The geospatial mapping of climate vulnerability of medical products aimed at assessing the effect of climatic factors (temperature, humidity, quality of water) on antibiotic quality is an unexplored research area. Among the climatic factors, extreme temperatures are known to accelerate drug degradation, potentially driving substandard medicines in some climatic zones. Clima-Aware proposes to investigate the quality of oral human antibiotics purchased from community access outlets in the different climatic zones in Kenya and correlate the quality to climatic factors, with a bearing on geographic and socioeconomic stratification.
What is your solution?
Clima-Aware aims to map the climatic vulnerability of oral antibiotics used for human health. The antibiotics will be of the 'access group' of the WHO classification and be most frequently used based on reported Kenyan consumption rates. The solution will harness both novel datasets of antibiotic quality collected from different climatic zones in Kenya, guided by the Medicines Risk-based Surveillance (MedRS) software and geospatial mapping and modelling technology to correlate antibiotic quality to climatic variables.
Using the MedRS tool, different regions from the six climatic zones in Kenya will be selected for sampling of antibiotics. The antibiotics will be transported and analyzed at a central ISO-certified quality control laboratory in Nairobi. Dry antibiotic powders will be reconstituted at the collection sites using water available locally, thus exposing the product to real-life conditions. Typically, quality studies have used ultrapure water for reconstitution, thus not providing data on the real-world quality of the product. Water samples from the respective study sites will also be quality-analyzed.
Geospatial technology will be used to map the quality of antibiotics across the six climatic zones, identify hotspots of substandard and falsified medicines, and correlate hotspots to climatic vulnerability, secondarily stratified by geographical marginalization and socioeconomic disparity.
Who does your solution serve, and in what ways will the solution impact their lives?
Clima-Aware will directly improve the lives of the Kenyan population, specifically the socioeconomically and geographically marginalized communities. By studying drug quality across the six climatic zones and investigating the effect of climatic variables on antibiotic quality, new practical knowledge will emerge. Critically, nationwide surveillance data on the quality of antibiotics is inadequate. This study aims to fill this knowledge gap by providing insights into patterns of substandard and falsified medicines in Kenya.
Communities in geographically marginalized areas will benefit from an evidence-based appreciation of the effect of climate variables on medicine quality. These populations are often disenfranchised from research studies. However, they may be the most susceptible to substandard medicines due to extreme temperatures and poor-quality water used to reconstitute antibiotic dry suspensions, driving drug degradation. The water available for reconstitution of antibiotics in arid and semi-arid regions has very different properties (salinity, pH, elemental composition, microbiota) from water available in the central highlands. Only through studies involving these regions can we glean data on the level of vulnerability of populations in arid and semi-arid areas to substandard products. Further, due to high incidences of product stock-outs, falsified medicines are likely to gain a foothold in such vulnerable pharmaceutical markets.
