Funder behind successful Covid-19 vaccines says cash could prevent future global tragedies
The global initiative at the heart of the rapid development of multiple vaccines against Covid-19 has said that with $3.5 billion it could “dramatically reduce or even eliminate” future pandemics and epidemics.
The Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations channels funding from governments and charities to disease research groups around the world and has played a key role in funding the development of Covid-19 vaccines. Its role has been vital in the development of the University of Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccines and the jab from US biotech company Moderna, which are already being rolled out globally.
On 10 March, Cepi announced its ‘moonshot’ goal to compress the timeline of vaccine development to 100 days. This is less than a third of the time it took between the sequencing of the Covid-19 virus and the companies Pfizer and BioNTech submitting data on their vaccine to regulators, which itself smashed previous records for vaccine development.
Down payment on safety
Laying out the organisation’s five-year plan, its chief executive Richard Hatchett said $3.5bn “represents a critical down payment towards the goal of a world safe from the devastating effects of epidemic and pandemic diseases”.
He said replicating the success of what had been achieved against Covid-19 with other viruses is a “large but finite problem, one we can solve if we work together in as little as five or 10 years”.
If it does get the money, Cepi plans to invest in global networks for lab capacity and pump resources into rapid vaccine development, working with national and regional partners.
John Nkengasong, director of the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, welcomed Cepi’s support for low- and middle-income countries. “Cepi is the key partner in helping to strengthen Africa’s capacity to prevent, to detect and to respond to emerging and re-emerging infectious disease threats,” he said.
Growing support
Global leaders pledged their support at a launch event for Cepi’s plan, although specific funding promises were not forthcoming.
Germany’s chancellor Angela Merkel said that “as one of Cepi’s founding members, Germany will continue to support the Coalition”, and the prime minister of Norway Erna Solberg also pledged continued support.
Ethiopia’s health minister Lia Tadesse said she was proud that Ethiopia was “the first African nation to partner and invest in Cepi and we hope that, over the next year, many others will follow”.
Other speakers pledging support included the philanthropist Melinda Gates and the director of the Wellcome Trust biomedical charity Jeremy Farrar.
Big backing
Currently, Cepi has support from 28 nations, as well as the European Union, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Wellcome Trust and private sector and public contributions.
The initiative was launched in 2017 in the wake of the 2014-15 west African Ebola epidemic, and has gained significant funding during the Covid-19 pandemic, with over $1.5bn pledged to date.
One plank of the organisation’s strategy is to strengthen existing vaccines against Covid-19 by mobilising $1bn in 2021 against the threat of emerging variants of the virus.
On 10 March Cepi announced up to $47m to support the development of candidate vaccines against new variants by the pharmaceutical companies VBI Vaccines and SK bioscience.
Cepi has also announced it will launch a call for proposals during March providing $200m for developing an ‘all-in-one’ vaccine against coronaviruses, the family of viruses which include both Sars and Mers.
A version of this article also appeared in Research Europe