Ivermectin, one of the two medicines used in our fixed-dose co-formulation — together with albendazole — is currently dosed individually, on a weight or height-based basis. This brings several complications to the logistics of mass drug administration (MDA) campaigns, requiring health workers to weigh or measure tens of thousands of people — a slow, complex process prone to error. A new large Individual Participant Data meta-analysis suggests that ivermectin could be delivered more effectively through a simplified dosing strategy: age-based fix doses.
The study, published in PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases, was led by researchers from Fundación Mundo Sano, a partner in our consortium. Based on anthropometric data from over 700,000 real individuals from 53 NTD-endemic countries, their findings show that using an age-based fixed dose for ivermectin not only simplifies ivermectin dosing, but can safely deliver the recommended dose of 200 µg/kg to 400 µg/kg to a greater percentage of the population that current methods, while greatly reducing under-dosing.
The simplified logistics of this alternative strategy could also help reduce the costs of distributing and administering the medicine: fewer staff would be needed, training would be simpler, and the risk of errors would decrease. These savings, particularly in health systems with limited resources, could help countries move closer to their disease elimination goals.
For STOP2030, this new evidence is particularly relevant. It directly aligns with our “one pill per person” strategy, providing additional evidence to support that ivermectin can be safely and effectively administered through fixed-dose regimens. Together with albendazole in our co-formulation, this approach could pave the way for faster, safer and more scalable mass drug administration campaigns for soil-transmitted helminth infections, strengthening global efforts to control and eliminate parasitic diseases.
