Kim Hong-Ji/REUTERS
In 2015 a MERS outbreak in South Korea took months to get under control. Now researchers want to develop and stockpile vaccines against this and other threats.
SARS, Zika, Ebola – when some of the world’s most terrifying disease outbreaks occur, health workers often find themselves powerless. A billion-dollar initiative launched on 18 January aims to change that situation by pre-emptively developing and stockpiling vaccines to combat potential epidemic threats.
“I'm thrilled. This is only the formal launch, and to have near $500 million — and likely more — to get started is great,” says Jeremy Farrar, director of biomedical charity the Wellcome Trust in London, one of the new project’s backers.
The Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) launched on 18 January at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, with an initial US$460 million of backing from Norway, Germany, Japan, the Wellcome Trust and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The organization expects to raise the full $1 billion that it needs for the next 5 years by the end of 2017, says John-Arne Røttingen, CEPI's interim chief executive. It is by far the largest vaccine development initiative ever against viruses that are potential epidemic threats.
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Stocking the pipelines
The Ebola epidemic that began in December 2013 in West Africa shows the need to develop vaccines pre-emptively, says Farrar. No vaccine against Ebola was available when the outbreak started, but researchers were able to develop a safe and effective vaccine against the Zaire strain responsible in record time — just a year and a half. Making a vaccine from scratch usually takes years, or even decades.
They were able to move fast because US and Canadian researchers had already developed experimental Ebola vaccines. Researchers fighting Ebola lost valuable time, however, because the experimental vaccines, which had sat on the shelf for years, had been tested for safety in animals, but not humans.
Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations. Preliminary Business Plan 2017–2021 (CEPI, 2016).
“We had to spend what was 9–12 months getting safety data for those vaccines, and that was 9–12 months where ultimately many people lost their lives,” says Farrar.
By contrast, the CEPI's planned work on MERS, Nipah and Lassa vaccines will take experimental vaccine candidates — two for each disease — through testing in humans to establish that they are safe and produce an immune response that is likely to be protective. It would then create sufficient stockpiles of promising candidates to rapidly test for efficacy, and possible use, in the event of an outbreak. For the three diseases initially targeted, the CEPI aims to have stockpiles by 2021.

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The CEPI is particularly keen for the United States to join, but discussions will take time given the change in administration, adds Røttingen. “Irrespective of the government, it was a bad time to engage the United States on that."