$200m in GAVI funding for rotavirus and pneumococcal vaccines

Our hometown newspaper, The Philadelphia Inquirer, reports today on the $200 million pledge made late last week by GAVI to support vaccination against rotavirus and pneumococcus in the developing world. Here's the GAVI press release about the announcement.

The Inquirer story quotes GAVI's estimates of the potential worldwide benefit of each vaccine in the coming years: 370,000 deaths and 14 million hospitalizations due to rotavirus could be prevented by 2015, as could 447,000 deaths attributable to pneumococcus.

The Inquirer story explains:

"GAVI said it would coordinate with the World Health Organization and UNICEF to acquire and distribute vaccines first in 'countries where the vaccines have shown efficacy. As new and more effective vaccines come on the market, and as political support grows for introducing them in other GAVI countries, we will scale up to meet demand.'"

Gates gives $287 million for HIV vaccine research

News about the Gates Foundation making an enormous contribution to global health has become nearly a weekly occurrence lately. Today's headline is the announcement of 16 grants totaling $287 million to continue work toward a possible HIV vaccine. Here's the New York Times story, the AP story, and the press release from Gates with an accompanying background document offering details on the recipients and their projects.

The amount of funding is impressive in isolation but is even more staggering when compared to the total dollars directed to HIV vaccine work in years past. In 2004, for example, U.S. research totaled $582 million, with an additional $120 million worldwide. Yesterday's announcement marks a significant investment in the work and another strong show of support for it from Gates.

The Gates Foundation has been an active supporter of HIV vaccine research for several years, playing central roles in the creation and launch of the Global HIV Vaccine Enterprise (which we previously wrote about here). In fact, it's often difficult to determine where the Gates Foundation ends and the Enterprise begins, and vice versa. The grants announced yesterday fund projects linked to the Scientific Strategic Plan of the Global Vaccine Enterprise, awarded to very prominent vaccine researchers including Barton Haynes of Duke and David Ho of Rockefeller University, among others.

Gates gives $27.8 million to study rollout of HPV vaccines in developing world

As Reuters and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer are reporting today, the Gates Foundation has awarded $27.8 million for HPV implementation research to PATH, a Seattle-based non-profit and frequent recipient of Gates funding. (In April, PATH received $75 million from Gates for research on next-generation pneumonia vaccines, as we discussed here.)

This project is intended to determine the best approach for introducing HPV vaccines to developing countries. Initially, PATH will conduct pilot studies in India, Peru, Uganda, and Vietnam. As the PATH press release describes, both Merck and GSK are onboard with this program, pledging to provide their vaccines (once licensed) to the research initiatives. Dr. Regina Rabinovich, director of infectious diseases at the Gates Foundation, describes PATH's objective this way:

"PATH will help determine how to deliver these vaccines in developing countries, where systems to reach young women with health services are fragile, and cervical cancer may not be seen as a problem because so few women are screened."

There's no doubt that HPV vaccines would prevent far more cervical cancer deaths in developing countries than in the developed world, yet its projected cost and a host of implementation challenges mean that those populations needing the vaccine most will likely be among the last to receive it. Ultimately, finding a way to reduce dramatically (or underwrite) the vaccine's cost will be the greatest obstacle to HPV vaccines' global availability, but today's news is, by any estimation, a positive step toward that goal.

$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.