A call for unified strategies
Universities, countries, international consortiums, and public-private partnerships are all racing to find several safe and effective vaccines as no one entity will likely be able to provide the global solution.
Some of the efforts involve overlap of entities but with different focuses.
Along with “Operation Warp Speed” and CEPI, other collaborations include Gavi the Vaccine Alliance, whose core partners include WHO, UNICEF, the World Bank, and the Gates Foundation; and “Accelerating Therapeutic Interventions and Vaccines (ACTIV) partnership,” led by the National Institutes of Health.
Industry partners in ACTIV (18 biopharmaceutical companies), according to a May 18 article published online in the Journal of the American Medical Association, have said they will contribute their respective clinical trial capacities, regardless of which agent is studied.
Some, however, have called for more streamlining of efforts.
“Ideally we’d be working together,” Lurie told Medscape Medical News.
“I’m hopeful we will find ways to collaborate scientifically,” she said. “The US government’s responsibility is to make doses for the US. CEPI’s responsibility is to make doses for the world. A big focus of CEPI is to make sure we have manufacturing capacity outside of the US so those doses can be available to the world and they don’t get seized by wealthy countries.”
Bottazzi, Ledley, Lurie, and Andino report no relevant financial relationships.
This article first appeared on Medscape.com.