New vaccine coalition targets epidemics.

A new global vaccine development fund called the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) aims to stimulate, facilitate and finance the development of vaccines against infectious disease epidemics.

The CEPI public–private partnership is currently backed by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Wellcome Trust, the World Economic Forum, the government of India and the Norwegian government.

The fund was proposed in 2015, in an article co-authored by Wellcome Trust Director Jeremy Farrar calling for a US$2 billion collaboration to foster vaccine development (10.1056/NEJMp1506820). John-Arne Røttingen, interim CEO of the CEPI, told that the public–private partnership hopes to raise enough money to spend “a couple of hundred million dollars” annually in its early years.

It will initially focus on encouraging the development of two or three as yet unidentified vaccines. Initial priorities could include chikungunya, coronaviruses, filoviruses, Rift Valley fever, West Nile fever, Crimean–Congo haemorrhagic fever and Nipah virus.

The CEPI points out that the most recent outbreak of Ebola killed more than 11,000 people and caused an estimated economic loss of more than US$2 billion. Because epidemics disproportionately affect low-income countries, the CEPI will ensure that any vaccines it helps to develop will be affordable.

GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) has meanwhile proposed launching a 'biopreparedness unit' that would be dedicated to the development of critical but commercially unattractive vaccines. The company has said it is ready to provide a facility, staff and technology, and is looking for funding from public or private entities such as the CEPI. GSK's chairman of vaccines Moncef Slaoui, who is on the CEPI's interim board of directors, has been advocating for a more concerted effort to control potentially epidemic pathogens ().