The Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations has recently decided to expand its vaccine testing network, which was established over a year ago to assess COVID-19 vaccines.
The expansion means CEPI will now also support assessments of vaccine candidates for other diseases, including chikungunya, Lassa fever, MERS, Nipah, Rift Valley fever, and “Disease X,” a name given by the World Health Organization to a potential disease threat caused by an unknown pathogen.
The support comes in the form of financing and technical assistance. CEPI provides the methodology in analyzing vaccines, as well as supporting laboratories in its network to purchase the instruments needed to do the testing and the software to analyze the data. They also pay for the actual testing of the samples from vaccine developers too.
CEPI is hoping that laboratories based in South America, Africa, and Oceania also join the network. A call for proposals is currently open until Feb. 18, 2022.
As for who can join, Valentina Bernasconi, project lead for CEPI’s laboratory network, said, “We are looking for laboratories that have high-quality standards because we want to rely on the results they produce.” But the organization is also ready to help “build some capacity” for laboratories,” said Dr. Melanie Saville, director of vaccine R&D at CEPI.
Why it matters: CEPI’s mandate is to accelerate the development of vaccines for emerging infectious diseases. When COVID-19 struck, the multilateral organization invested in 14 vaccine candidates to support their pre-clinical and clinical testing. But as the number of vaccine developers grew, it became difficult to assess and compare.
ACT-A launches new plan amid persistent challenges
Within the next 12 months, agencies part of ACT-A aims to support low- and middle-income countries in vaccinating 70% of their population, increasing their testing rates to at least 1 per 1,000 people each day, and treating up to 120 million COVID-19 cases.
“If you have 10 different laboratories that are trying to follow their own recipe and with their own reagents or with their own material, the results that you get in the end will never be the same,” said Bernasconi. Thus, using the same methodology and reagents is important, she added.
Expanding its testing network to other diseases such as Disease X is also important as part of preparedness measures.
“What if something like COVID happens again? It would probably happen. We don't know when, we don't know how, and we don't know which virus [it] will be, so we really need to be prepared and develop assays and deploy them where they're needed,” she said.
What is the caveat? Vaccine developers decide whether to publish the results.
“The reason is because they own the results that they get,” said Bernasconi. But she emphasized that CEPI “really strongly” encourages developers to do so for the benefit of the scientific community.
About the author
Jenny Lei Ravelo@JennyLeiRavelo
Jenny Lei Ravelo is a Devex Senior Reporter based in Manila. She covers global health, with a particular focus on the World Health Organization, and other development and humanitarian aid trends in Asia Pacific. Prior to Devex, she wrote for ABS-CBN, one of the largest broadcasting networks in the Philippines, and was a copy editor for various international scientific journals. She received her journalism degree from the University of Santo Tomas.
