Deadline: 20-Jan-23

Unitaid is pleased to announce a new Call for Proposals for the area for intervention: Optimizing the management of coinfections and comorbidities in people living with HIV.

Building on prior work to introduce accessible optimal tools for screening and diagnosis, prevention, and treatment of Advanced HIV Disease (AHD) in low- and middle-income countries, Unitaid seeks to further support simplification and decentralization of the AHD care package, including for children.

Specifically, the objective of this call for proposals is to identify interventions that can support the adoption of optimized AHD packages of care, and innovative delivery models to manage AHD for people living with HIV, including children living with HIV, enabling further simplification and decentralization of AHD management.

Areas out of scope for this call include proposals:

• Focusing on the development of products still in the pipeline or large clinical trials,
• Aiming to deliver services without a focus on optimizing and supporting expanded access to under-used and/or new commodities referred to for the diagnosis, prevention, and treatment of opportunistic infections,
• Aiming for full-scale implementation and/or delivery of products.
• Proposals submitted should clearly demonstrate the fit with the objective(s) set out , the expected impact and value for money as well as the complementarity and added value to similar projects in this area.

Aims

• Through this Call for Proposals, Unitaid aims to increase equitable access to optimal products for AHD management in adults and children in the following ways:
  • Further demonstrating decentralized delivery models for AHD care to prevent loss to follow-up along the care cascade.
  • Generating real-world evidence regarding optimal strategies and delivery models for rapid diagnosis, prevention, and treatment of HIV-associated infections in children.
  • Facilitating adoption and implementation of WHO Advanced HIV Disease guidance (including recent cryptococcal meningitis and histoplasmosis guidelines [11] and STOP AIDS toolkit [4] and expanding access to and use of optimized components of such packages of care, to enable further scale up.

Objectives

• Under this call, Unitaid is soliciting proposals that can support the objective of reducing mortality by:
  • Supporting innovative approaches to improve implementation and enable increased utilization of the STOP-AIDS toolkit to prevent, diagnose, and treat AHD-associated opportunistic infections in pediatric populations through:
    • Supporting introduction of the toolkit in selected early-adopter countries to enable and accelerate expanded access conditions to life-saving tools,
    • And generating operational evidence on the implementation of the toolkit, to optimize and demonstrate the effective use of existing under-used and new tools in real-life high-burden settings.
  • Supporting introduction of emerging tools that could complement the current care package recommended by WHO for adults and adolescents living with HIV to enable further simplification in selected early-adopter countries and early management of main drivers of death that remain unaddressed (DH, SBIs) and/or that can be further optimized with recent products entering the market (CM).

Eligibility Questionnaire 

• Take their questionnaire to find out whether your proposal could be eligible for Unitaid funding.
  • Does your proposal address at least one of the areas specified in the current, open call for proposals?
  • Can your proposal plausibly demonstrate potential for achieving global impact?
  • Is your proposed approach innovative?
  • Is your proposal sustainable and scalable?
  • Are your target countries low- or middle–income?
  • Does your organization have a proven track record implementing similar projects?
  • Is your proposal’s budget scoped at the minimum size?
  • Does your proposal demonstrate good value for money?

For more information, visit https://unitaid.org/call-for-proposal/preventing-deaths-among-adults-and-children-by-simplifying-advanced-hiv-disease-management/#en