Four innovations that are changing patients’ lives

MSF teams around the world often encounter major challenges in delivering healthcare to the people who need it most. To overcome these challenges, our researchers develop life-saving solutions. 

At MSF Scientific Days, this research is shared and celebrated. Here are four new projects bringing innovative healthcare to patients and changing how we work.

1. A new antivenom

Someone is bitten by a snake every 10 seconds. And every year, 100,000 people die from snakebite. 

But access to antivenom remains a major challenge for people across many parts of Africa. Treatments are often expensive, difficult to transport, and unavailable in many health facilities, leaving communities without timely care.

To improve access to treatment in remote settings, MSF introduced the new PANAF, a pan-African antivenom, in June 2025 in consultation with health authorities in Ethiopia. PANAF is a WHO pre-approved antivenom that does not require cold-chain storage – it doesn’t need a fridge – making it significantly easier to transport and store.

It is also cheaper than other antivenoms as it covers any venomous bite from African snakes. 

2. Increasing malaria vaccination coverage

Malaria is the single largest disease treated by MSF. Despite improvements in its treatment and prevention, it continues to kill over 600,000 people each year.

The search for a malaria vaccine began in the 1960s, but it wasn’t until 2021 that a vaccine was approved by the World Health Organization (WHO). Now, the second ever malaria vaccine, the R21 vaccine, has been approved in many countries where MSF works for widespread use in children.

Vaccine coverage is often a logistics problem, not a demand problem. For people living in remote areas, it can be challenging to keep up with the dose schedule.

Recent research by MSF teams in Burkina Faso, Mali and Chad has shown that delivering the vaccine alongside seasonal malaria chemoprevention medication—that can be taken as a dissolvable tablet—significantly boosts coverage. 

3. Revolutionising meningitis treatment for people living with HIV

Cryptococcal meningitis is an opportunistic fungal infection and the second biggest killer of people living with HIV/AIDS after tuberculosis. Opportunistic infections occur more often or are more severe in people with weakened immune systems.

The standard treatment is a two-week hospital stay with intravenous drugs. However, a new innovative one-day treatment has been shown to work well, with fewer side effects and as safe and effective as the current treatment.

MSF teams treated patients in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Guinea and Mozambique.

4. Documenting conflict surgery in Gaza

A new study has documented rare and vital evidence from Gaza’s overwhelmed health system. While the vast scale of traumatic injury in Gaza has long been evident, it hadn’t been systematically recorded.

The study explains in depth the traumatic injuries seen and surgeries carried out in MSF’s Al-Aqsa field hospital between August 2024 and August 2025.

The dataset of over 4,000 surgical admissions in one year alone is one of the most significant conflict surgery datasets assembled in recent years. Documentation isn't just about numbers, it’s also about learning what kind of interventions are most effective. It's also important to combine the medical data with our context data to understand a fuller picture of what’s been happening. The archive of collected data will be available for future study and analysis.