A global coalition of infectious disease specialists, philanthropists and governments has a new plan to stop emerging epidemics in their tracks.
The Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Its goal is to develop vaccines for known infectious disease threats that can be quickly distributed to contain outbreaks before they start to spread.
CEPI has received an initial US$460 million in funding from the U.K.-based Wellcome Trust, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, as well as the governments of Germany, Japan and Norway. The coalition says it needs a billion dollars for its first five years of work, and is hoping that more governments and investors will come forward.
鈥淲hat we hope to do in CEPI is develop vaccines ahead of time so that we are better prepared for the next outbreak,鈥� Nancy Lee, a Wellcome Trust policy adviser, told CTV鈥檚 Your Morning on Thursday.
She said the most recent Ebola outbreak, which killed more than 11,000 people in West Africa since 2014, showed the world that it still wasn鈥檛 prepared for such epidemics. Although a Canadian-developed experimental Ebola vaccine proved highly successful, its deployment came too late in the outbreak that ravaged Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone.
Now, CEPI hopes to have safe and effective vaccines ready to go before another disease outbreak.
The coalition will focus on three viral illnesses over the next three years: Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), which has been linked to camels in the Arabian Peninsula; Lassa fever, an often fatal disease that occurs in West Africa; and Nipah, a serious illness found in both humans and animals.
Lee said those three viral diseases have been chosen from the World Health Organization鈥檚 list of so-called priority pathogens. CEPI also made its choices based on the likelihood of an outbreak, public health impact, and the feasibility of creating a vaccine, Lee added.
In a news release, CEPI also said it will 鈥渟cope out potential support鈥� for vaccines against multiple strains of the Zika, Ebola and Marburg viruses. The Marburg virus comes from the same family as Ebola and causes a 鈥渉ighly fatal鈥� disease in infected humans, according to WHO.
Lee said the hope is that CEPI will eventually speed up the overall production of vaccines before any new outbreaks can take hold.
