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2025 has been an incredibly busy year with research milestones, publications, home and international events, and meetings. We’ve tried to sum everything up as concisely as possible with links for you to read more about anything that interests you.
So here it goes; overseen by CELT Global Health directors Professor Andrew Owen and Professor Steve Rannard, this is what LONGEVITY’s 2025 has looked like.
Funded by global health agency Unitaid, the LONGEVITY project is a consortium of expert organisations who take a drug from concept, community outreach, preclinical testing, licencing manufacturing, all the way to phase I clinical trial. All eight international partner organisations are specifically aiming to create long-acting therapeutics, based on drugs we already know to be safe and effective. We’re working specifically to target hepatitis C virus, malaria and tuberculosis for patients in low- and middle- income countries (LMICs), where these diseases have the most devastating impact.
Hepatitis C virus
LONGEVITY’s hepatitis C virus work was presented via 2 talks and 2 posters at 3 different global events this year and one webinar hosted by LONGEVITY partner Treatment Action Group (TAG). Included amongst these was:
- CELT’s Dr Catherine Unsworth’s presented a talk about their poster titled ‘Preclinical development of long-acting injectable formulations of glecaprevir and pibrentasvir for curative treatment of Hepatitis C in low- and middle-income countries’ at AAPS PharmSci 360
- We released a recording of Dr Unsworth’s talk at last year’s Advances in Long-acting Therapeutics Meeting
- A poster from CELT’s Dr Usman Arshad at the Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections (CROI) titled ‘Preclinical Pharmacokinetic Assessment of a Long-Acting Solid Injectable for Hepatitis C Virus’
- Renae Furl from University of Nebraska Medical Center presented LONGEVITY’s hepatitis C virus community engagement research at the TAG webinar in May.
We used a Hepatitis Testing Day blog to highlight why we’re focusing on hepatitis C Virus and discussed Dr Arshad’s CROI poster in our blog for World Hepatitis Day in July. TAG used the day to launch a storyboard of a personal story of Sibusiso Dlamini's journey through substance use and hepatitis C virus treatment in South Africa.
Malaria
We have been working closely with the School of Pharmacy team at Queen’s University Belfast on proof-of-concept for a long-acting microarray patch for malaria prevention. Children under 5 years old in the WHO Africa Region make up a disproportionate number of the deaths from malaria. We want to create a long-acting malaria prevention option that is more suitable for children and microarray patches hold great promise to meet that need.
We wrote an update piece for World Malaria Day in April.
Tuberculosis
In May, a paper about LONGEVITY’s LMIC tuberculosis patient and provider community and civil engagement work was published in the International Journal of Tuberculosis and Lung Disease Open. The article is titled ‘Patient and provider preferences for long-acting TB preventive therapy’ and is a big step forward in validating LONGEVITY’s tuberculosis goals.
LONGEVITY’s tuberculosis work was presented via 5 talks and 2 posters at 6 different global events this year and one webinar hosted by LONGEVITY partner Treatment Action Group (TAG).
Results from the Journal of Tuberculosis and Lung Disease paper were presented by Dr Marcia Vermeulen from University of Cape Town, who led the research, at the Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections, The University of Cape Town Department of Medicine Annual Research Symposium and Khayelitsha and Eastern Substructure (KESS) Research Day. They were also presented by a LONGEVITY long-acting therapeutics community advisory board member at the International Network on Health and Hepatitis in Substance Users Conference. Dr Vermeulen also explained the results at a webinar hosted by LONGEVITY partner Treatment Action Group.
CELT’s Dr Cameron Hogarth presented a poster titled ‘Preclinical development of a long-acting injectable formulation of rifapentine from high throughput screening through to a GLP-toxicology study’ at this year’s AAPS PharmSci360 conference in San Antonio.
We wrote a piece about where we’re up to in our clinical trials preparation work for LONGEVITY’s tuberculosis research for World Tuberculosis Day in April. We used it to explain the complexity of moving from laboratory to clinical assessments, as the public don’t often get to hear about this critical aspect of long-acting therapeutics development.
General LONGEVITY
To do our LONGEVITY work, there are key principles that we research and apply to the three key diseases. As well as the variety of publications, event presentations and blogs mentioned above, LONGEVITY outputs were also presented at other events. These included the British Society of Nanomedicine annual meeting in Belfast and the International Workshop on Clinical Pharmacology of HIV, Hepatitis, and Other Antiviral Drugs 2025.
We also worked with other Unitaid grantees at the University of Washington, to harness and disseminate our shared learning through a paper titled ‘The promises and prospects of long-acting therapeutics for treatment and prevention of infectious diseases’ which was published in Annual Review of Pharmacology and Toxicology.
Other general LONGEVITY blogs published throughout the year, included a piece for the International Day of Women and Girls in Science, World Breastfeeding Week, International Day for Universal Access to Information Day, Manufacturing Day and World Children’s Day.
Finally, we published a paper titled ‘Development of solid drug nanoparticle dispersions for pulmonary delivery of niclosamide and nitazoxanide via vibrating mesh nebulisation’ in RSC Pharmaceutics, describing LONGEVITY work conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic when new therapeutic interventions were desperately needed.
LONGEVITY in numbers
Publications: 3
Posters presented: 6
Talks and workshops presented: 10
Countries presented in: 4
WHO Regions presented in: 3
News stories: 3
Press / media mentions: 4
Blogs posted: 11
Conclusion of 2025
With such a strong year almost behind us, we can only be enthusiastic about the new year to come. We have some important research milestones on the horizon and an array of events to look forward to. Some events are ones we haven’t attended before and others are well known to us. We’re especially pleased that a LONGEVITY abstract has been selected for CROI 2026.
We have several exciting milestones planned for the year ahead, so please stay connected with us. We’ll keep working with a patient focus to find appropriate and convenient long-acting medicines to help those who need them, so do keep in touch for news as it comes.
Happy New Year.
The LONGEVITY project aims to simplify hepatitis C virus, malaria and tuberculosis treatment and preventative treatment to reduce the drug burden and the number of patients requiring complex therapies for active disease.
Find out more about the LONGEVITY project
The LONGEVITY Project is funded by global health agency Unitaid.
The project also involves critical partners and collaborators in the Clinton Health Access Initiative, Johns Hopkins University, Medicines Patent Pool, Tandem Nano Ltd., Treatment Action Group and the University of Nebraska Medical Center.
