Bill Gates Foundation “accelerates the development of COVID-19 infection treatment”

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the world’s largest charity fund founded by Microsoft founder Bill Gates and his wife, Merlinda, has launched the COVID-19 Therapeutics Accelerator to accelerate the development of COVID-19 treatments. Announced. The foundation said that it aims to speed up the response to Corona 19 by investing $125 million in funding with Wellcome and Mastercard.

The program, announced by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, accelerates and evaluates the development of new or existing drugs and biologics, aims to treat patients with COVID-19 in the short term and to treat viral pathogens in the long term. There are no antiviral drugs or immunotherapy available for COVID-19 yet.

The Foundation and Welcome will donate $50 million each, and the MasterCard Impact Fund will donate $25 million to support this. In addition, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has already announced that it will provide $100 million for COVID-19 countermeasures, and the $50 million provided for this program is expected to be part of this.

Mark Suzman, CEO of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, said that although Corona 19 has spread rapidly, the development of vaccines or treatments to stop it is slow.If you want to protect the world from viruses like Corona 19, further research and development for the most vulnerable people. He stressed the need to find a way to accelerate. In addition, he explained the reason for the start of the program by saying that the government, private companies, and charities should act quickly and provide funding for research and development.

The program connects with the World Health Organization WHO, government and private sector funders, and regulatory and policy organizations around the world, and provides end-to-end support from development pipeline development to production scale-up in developing COVID-19 treatments. The Foundation says it will provide fast and flexible funding at an important stage in the development process to reduce the risk of developing new drugs and biological products against COVID-19 and potential infections in the future and provide them to underdeveloped countries.

The program seeks to streamline the path to clinical evaluation, use, and manufacturing of candidate drugs pursuing multiple aspects of the therapeutic development cycle. In addition, in order to identify candidate compounds for treatment, it takes three methods: testing a drug that has already been approved for COVID-19, creating a library of thousands of compounds using stability data, testing new compounds and considering antibodies.

The biotech and pharmaceutical industries will become important partners in the program, leveraging compound libraries and clinical data to provide the expertise needed to scale up existing pharmaceuticals or antibodies. In addition, it plans to cooperate with regulatory authorities to set standards for Corona 19 and develop production capacity across the industry as a whole.

Effective treatment to patients takes one year for products that have been approved by regulatory authorities or candidates with existing clinical data. However, if the existing clinical data are limited or if the compound is in a more early stage of development, it will take longer to use. Welcome director Jeremy Farrar said the novel coronavirus is an unprecedented global threat, and international cooperation must be promoted for treatment, rapid diagnosis and vaccine development. It says that a lot of investment and research is needed.

Mike Froman, Vice Chairman of Mastercard, said he is proud to participate in the war on COVID-19. This global challenge is not only at risk to the health and safety of people around the world, but also to the economic vitality of millions of people, businesses and organizations. He stressed the importance of this program, saying it could create potential confusion. Related information can be found here .