In a swift response to the spread of a new coronavirus from China,
global outbreak preparedness group Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness
Innovations (CEPI) unveiled funding for three early-stage vaccine programs.
Moderna this week disclosed that it’s
working with federal researchers on a candidate, and now it’ll have
financial backing from CEPI. Pennsylvania-based Inovio Pharmaceuticals
scored $9 million in funding for its own program, and CEPI is further
expanding a partnership with the University of Queensland.
For Moderna, CEPI’s funding will cover
manufacturing for an mRNA vaccine candidate against the new coronavirus
strain. The work will be further supported by federal researchers at
the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) who
will conduct preclinical tests and a phase 1 study.
Separately, the CEPI grant will cover
Inovio’s development costs through phase 1 for the biotech’s candidate,
dubbed INO-4800. The vaccine is based on Inovio’s DNA medicine platform
that the company says enables rapid development of a vaccine against
emerging threats.
Inovio and CEPI already have some
history. In 2018, CEPI awarded Inovio up to $56 million over five years
for its work on Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) and Lassa fever
vaccine candidates.
Inovio was involved in the Zika
outbreak response as well and reached human testing with its vaccine
candidate in just seven months, CEO Joseph Kim said in a statement.
“We believe we can further improve upon
this accelerated timeline to meet the current challenge of the emerging
Chinese coronavirus 2019-nCoV,” he added.
The company has routinely jumped into
emerging disease research, but has yet to take a product through to an
approval. Moderna doesn’t have any approved drugs or vaccines, either.
The coronavirus out of Wuhan has already killed 26 people and infected at least 881 people, China state TV reported this week.
Aside from those vaccine efforts,
Baylor College of Medicine has a program to develop new coronavirus
vaccines for severe acute respiratory syndrome and MERS,
Peter Hotez, dean for the National School of Tropical Medicine,
told FiercePharma. In conjunction with NIAID, plus scientists in New
York and Shanghai, the team is testing whether the vaccines could
protect against the new coronavirus.
CEPI formed in 2017 as a partnership
between governments, philanthropists, pharma companies and others to
address a gap in vaccine development funding after Ebola and Zika caught
the world off guard. The group set out to raise $1 billion to fund
research against numerous threats, and, so far, it has granted $450
million.
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