A consortium of life sciences companies announced an important collaboration to accelerate the development, manufacture, and delivery of vaccines, diagnostics, and treatments for COVID-19.
The life sciences industry brings a range of assets, resources, and expertise needed to identify effective and scalable solutions to the pandemic, which is affecting billions worldwide. The impact on health systems, economies, and livelihoods is profound, and an effective response requires unprecedented collaboration across governments, academia, the private sector, and the philanthropic community.
Trials of existing drugs, diagnostic tests, compounds, and investigational vaccines have begun across the globe to identify interventions that could slow or end the pandemic. Products that demonstrate efficacy will require clinical study, scale-up of manufacturing, and distribution if proven effective. The life sciences industry has extensive experience in managing these processes for products that reach billions of people every day.
“We know that the private sector is where the technical skills and know-how regarding discovery, clinical trials, and commercialization sit,” said Mark Suzman, chief executive officer of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. “We look to harness that knowledge and experience—combining it where possible—to connect with national regulators and the World Health Organization to see if we can help flatten the curve of this epidemic and make sure the results reach everyone around the world, particularly those at highest risk and the poorest.”
Following a conference call with Gates Foundation leadership earlier this month, companies are working to identify concrete actions that will accelerate treatments, vaccines, and diagnostics to the field. As a first step, 15 companies have agreed to share their proprietary libraries of molecular compounds that already have some degree of safety and activity data with the COVID-19 Therapeutics Accelerator—launched by the Gates Foundation, Wellcome, and Mastercard two weeks ago—to quickly screen them for potential use against COVID-19. Successful hits would move rapidly into in vivo trials in as little as two months.
Companies participating in the collaboration include BD, bioMérieux, Boehringer Ingelheim, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Eisai, Eli Lilly, Gilead, GSK, Johnson & Johnson, Merck (known as MSD outside the U.S. and Canada), Merck KGaA, Novartis, Pfizer, and Sanofi.
Original source: Gates Foundation
Published on 25 March 2020
