This article was written by Laura Mangiarini, Penta Foundation Chief Operations Officer, Italy. It is taken from Penta’s 2022 Annual Social Report.
In more than 30 years of collaborative research on HIV, we are proud to have contributed to the development of key medicines, which have changed the prognosis and quality of life of children living with HIV across the world.
Although our commitment to paediatric HIV has not changed (much is still to be done: we want to move from treatment to cure!) we are applying our collaboration model, experience, best practices and lessons learned across the wide range of serious infections which threaten our children. We now have open studies targeting serious neonatal infections (viral, bacterial or fungal), antibiotic resistance, and new pathogens with pandemic potential.
We build our projects in a way that ensures the sustainability of the expertise and outputs deriving from these collaborations. VERDI is an example of this model: born as a platform to study SARS-CoV-2 variants, then expanded to mpox and further, it is now developing a preparedness platform to be activated as new pathogens emerge.
Looking to the future, we will continue to build on the potential of using and re-using study data and exploit all the potential of the information deriving from the analysis of data from the real world, building processes which allow us to face all the legal challenges which come with these new approaches.
We will be targeting respiratory infections, which are becoming a new threat to our children, like the Respiratory Syncytial Virus. In more than 30 years of collaborative research on HIV, we are proud to have contributed to the development of key medicines, which have changed the prognosis and quality of life of children living with HIV across the world. We will be designing new studies testing not only traditional chemical compounds, but also vaccines and monoclonal antibodies.
Nothing of the above could be done without our Network of researchers across the world, which allow us to provide the right expertise where it is most needed and at the right time… and to continue to be a global network at the forefront of science.