- The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Wellcome, and Mastercard announced that they committed up to $125 million in seed funding
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Wellcome, and Mastercard announced recently that they committed up to $125 million in seed funding to speed up the response to the COVID-19 pandemic by identifying, assessing, developing, and scaling-up treatments. These organizations are committed to equitable access, including making products available and affordable in low-resource settings.
The COVID-19 Therapeutics Accelerator is going to play a catalytic role by accelerating and evaluating new and repurposed drugs and biologics to treat patients with COVID-19 in the immediate term and other viral pathogens in the longer-term. Unfortunately, there are no broad-spectrum antivirals or immunotherapies available for the fight against emerging pathogens and none approved for use on COVID-19.
The Gates Foundation and Wellcome are each contributing up to $50 million. And the Mastercard Impact Fund committed up to $25 million to catalyze the initial work of the accelerator. The Gates Foundation’s funding is part of its $100 million commitment to the COVID-19 response announced last month.
The COVID-19 Therapeutics Accelerator is going to work with the World Health Organization, government and private sector funders and organizations along with the global regulatory and policy-setting institutions. Plus the Accelerator will have an end-to-end focus ranging from drug pipeline development through manufacturing and scale-up.
As these organizations share research, coordinate investments, and pool resources, the efforts can help to accelerate research. This was one of the biggest learnings with the 2014 Ebola outbreak.
By providing flexible funding at key stages of the development process, the Accelerator is going to de-risk the pathway for new drugs and biologics for COVID-19 and future epidemic threats while ensuring access in lower-resource countries.
The COVID-19 Therapeutics Accelerator is operating jointly as an initiative of the funders and is drawing on expertise from inside and outside their organizations. Plus the Accelerator will pursue several aspects of the development cycle to streamline the pathway from candidate product to clinical assessment, use, and manufacturing.
In order to identify candidate compounds, the Accelerator will take a three-pronged approach: testing approved drugs for activity against COVID-19, screening libraries of thousands of compounds with confirmed safety data, and considering new investigational compounds and monoclonal antibodies.
The drugs or monoclonal antibodies that pass initial screening would then be developed by an industry partner. And the biotech and pharmaceutical industries will be critical partners, bringing their compound libraries and clinical data to the collaboration and lending commercialization and other expertise that will be required to scale up successful drugs and monoclonal antibodies.
Along with the development of the COVID-19 drug pipeline, the Accelerator will work with regulators to align criteria and develop manufacturing capacity with industry. And an accelerated pathway to bringing effective treatments to patients is around one year for products that have current regulatory approval or candidates with existing clinical data.
Key Quotes:
“Epidemics introduce a paradox to the world. Viruses like COVID-19 spread rapidly but developing vaccines and treatments to stop them moves slowly. If we want to make people, particularly the most vulnerable, safer from outbreaks then we need to find a way to unwind this paradox: to speed up R&D and slow down the spread.”
“The only way to treat a viral infection, such as COVID-19, is with antiviral drugs. Right now, we can only treat the symptoms since there simply aren’t antiviral medications that can treat a range of conditions in the same way that antibiotics do for bacterial infections. This is where we believe we can help by partnering with private and philanthropic enterprises to lower the financial risk and technical barriers for biotech and pharmaceutical companies developing antivirals for COVID-19.”
-Mark Suzman, the CEO of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
“This virus is an unprecedented global threat and one for which we must propel international partnerships to develop treatments, rapid diagnostics, and vaccines. Science is moving at a phenomenal pace against COVID-19, but to get ahead of this epidemic we need greater investment and to ensure research co-ordination. The Therapeutics Accelerator will allow us to do this for potential treatments with support for research, development, assessment, and manufacturing. COVID-19 is an extremely challenging virus, but we’ve proved that through collaborating across borders we can tackle emerging infectious diseases. We must strive to strengthen efforts in the face of COVID-19, and in doing so, continue to make sure advances are accessible and affordable to all. Investing now, at scale, at risk and as a collective global effort is vital if we are to change the course of this epidemic. We welcome others to join us in this effort.”
-Dr. Jeremy Farrar, director of Wellcome
“We’re proud to join this crucial effort to combat COVID-19 in furtherance of our commitment to inclusive growth,” said Mike Froman, vice chairman of Mastercard. “This global challenge not only represents a risk to the health and safety of populations all over the world, but also poses a potential disruption to the economic vitality of millions of people, businesses, and organizations worldwide. Our experience with financial inclusion shows us the importance of building a network of parties who bring not only their capital, but complementary assets and skillsets to the table, and we welcome other partners concerned about inclusive growth to join this effort.”
-Mike Froman, vice chairman of Mastercard
