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Interested in more global health innovation news? Every week GHTC scours media reports worldwide to deliver essential global health R&D news and content to your inbox. Sign-up now to receive our weekly R&D News Roundup email.This morning, Moderna announced 94 percent efficacy of its mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccine candidate in the main analysis of its late-stage trial, and the company is now seeking emergency use regulatory clearances in the United States and Europe. The updated results from Moderna’s 30,000-volunteer phase 3 study show a total of 196 symptomatic cases of COVID-19, of which 185 received a placebo injection and 11 received the vaccine. The news follows similarly strong results from Pfizer and BioNTech’s vaccine candidate, which the companies submitted for US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) emergency use authorization on November 20. The FDA committee will convene December 10 to review Pfizer’s vaccine candidate and December 17 to review Moderna’s candidate.Thirteen African countries and an international network of research institutions are launching a multi-country clinical trial of COVID-19 treatments in patients with mild to moderate illness. Led by the Drugs for Neglected Diseases initiative, the ANTICOV trial aims to identify drugs that can be used for early treatment of COVID-19. The ANTICOV consortium will carry out the trial at 19 sites across 13 countries and will begin by examining repurposed drugs that have previously been used for HIV, malaria, and other infectious diseases before expanding to additional treatments and adapting over time. The trial is part of the Access to COVID-19 Tools (ACT) Accelerator therapeutics pillar, launched in April to ensure equitable global access to COVID-19 innovations.As several COVID-19 vaccine candidates await regulatory clearance by health authorities around the world, the question of global distribution efforts is becoming more relevant. While the United States and European countries have signed direct agreements with vaccine developers to secure enough doses to cover their populations if the vaccine candidates are approved, many low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) will be reliant on the ACT Accelerator’s vaccines pillar, a mechanism aiming to accelerate development and equitable distribution of COVID-19 vaccines. The effort plans to distribute 1 billion vaccine doses to LMICs based on a “fair allocation program” by the end of 2021, which will cover about 20 percent of their populations, but it will likely face distribution and storage challenges due to funding gaps, manufacturing facility locations, and cold-storage requirements.  

The Global Health Technologies Coalition (GHTC) strongly endorses yesterday’s declaration from G20 health ministers elevating the importance of investments in new tools and technologies to fight infectious diseases—work that has provided a strong foundation for combatting the COVID-19 pandemic and can be broadly beneficial in confronting a wide range of other threats.There is now a growing understanding of what GHTC members have long understood: infectious diseases are formidable foes that easily traverse national borders with the potential to inflict substantial damage on people and economies. The G20 statement affirms that our best defense is to support international collaborations to produce new drugs, vaccines, and diagnostic tests and make them affordable and accessible everywhere. GHTC welcomes the support expressed by G20 leaders for the Access to COVID-19 Tools Accelerator (ACT-A), highlighting the importance of this landmark cooperation to accelerate the development, manufacturing, distribution of, and equitable access to new health technologies in the fight against COVID-19. It is now imperative that G20 members match their rhetoric with action and make concrete funding commitments to close the US$28 billion funding gap for ACT-A, including the $4.6 billion in urgent investment that it needs in the coming months to fulfill its mandate. G20 leaders should also continue to work collaboratively with the Independent Panel for Pandemic Preparedness and Response and the International Health Regulations Review Committee on evaluating the global health response to the COVID-19 pandemic and ensure that the recommendations and lessons outlined by these review processes lead to concrete reforms. Now is the time to take important steps to strengthen global mechanisms and infrastructure and build back better to ensure that we develop the preparedness and response capacities needed for the next pandemic.The ministers also rightly noted that even as we fight COVID-19, we must continue supporting research and development (R&D) that addresses other emerging threats. They point to the need for new tools to fight antimicrobial resistance (AMR), including drug-resistant strains of tuberculosis. The ministers called on G20 member states to pursue international collaborations to develop better antimicrobials, vaccines, and diagnostics and noted the importance of the Global AMR R&D Hub to facilitate this work. As the world grapples with COVID-19, it is critical for the G20 health ministers to take a lead role in highlighting the importance of health R&D, both to respond to the current pandemic and answer the call of many other health challenges. The forceful statement from the ministers is a timely reminder that subduing global health threats requires rallying a global community around an effective strategy, one that includes a strong emphasis on innovation and equitable access.