Coalition eyes new vaccines in 100 days

The Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI)  yesterday launched a $3.5 billion five-year strategy to tackle future pandemic risks and set out what it called its "moonshot" plan to ensure new vaccines against emerging disease epidemics within 100 days. 

To be able to squeeze vaccine development timelines down to 100 days, CEPI said, researchers and drug developers would need to exploit the capabilities of so-called rapid response platform technologies, such as the mRNA approach used in Covid-19 shots developed by Pfizer-BioNtech and Moderna for example.

It would also involve working with global drugs regulators to streamline the requirements needed for vaccines to be approved, and linking-up manufacturing facilities to enable rapid production of pandemic vaccines, CEPI said.