$75 Million from Gates to PATH for pneumonia vaccine

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer reports this morning...

"Pneumonia is the leading killer of children worldwide, taking a life every 30 seconds, so the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has awarded Seattle-based PATH $75 million to create inexpensive vaccines tailored specifically to the disease strains prevalent in poor countries."

The award will be announced today at the 5th International Symposium on Pneumococci and Pneumococcal Diseases in Australia. PATH, a non-profit that frequently receives support from Gates, describes its mission as "improv[ing] the health of people around the world by advancing technologies, strengthening systems, and encouraging healthy behaviors."

The Seattle P-I continues...

"Children in the United States and Europe are routinely vaccinated against the leading strain of the bacteria, Streptococcus pneumoniae. But the Western vaccine does not protect well against varying strains found in developing countries -- where 90 percent of pneumococcal deaths occur.

Also, the current vaccine costs from $40 to $60 a dose -- a price that is completely unaffordable for most people in poor countries living on perhaps a dollar a day or less."

The vaccine referred to is Wyeth's Prevnar. Much like HPV, there are dozens of strains of pneumococcus, and Prevnar only provides protection against the 7 most common in the U.S. and elsewhere in the developed world. The stated goal of this project is to bring down dramatically the cost of a pneumonia vaccine (the story suggests $5/dose as a target) while developing candidate vaccines that are not specific to individual strains of the bacteria.

This news is only the most recent example of the leading role played by the Gates Foundation in steering vaccine research in new directions. Last week, we wrote about their commitment to a new tuberculosis vaccine for the developing world, and a few weeks earlier, we noted a Financial Times profile on Bill and Melinda Gates and their philanthropic efforts.