November 6, 2014
By Riley McDermid, BioSpace.com Breaking News Staff
The Europe Union and a host of international drugmakers said Thursday that they will pledge $350 million to double down on Ebola research, with the funding going to projects backed by the Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI), a public/private partnership between the European Commission and the pharmaceuticals industry.
Most of the money will go into the testing and manufacture of possible Ebola vaccines. The final agreement has the European Commission giving as much as 140 million euros, with companies responding in kind with staff time, goods and services.
“The EU is determined to help find a solution to Ebola. We are putting our money where our mouth is and boosting EU research on Ebola with an additional 280 million euros,” said Carlos Moedas, European Commissioner for research, in a statement.
The IMI has outlined five priority projects involving the three stages of vaccine clinical trials: manufacturing, transport and storage and deployment. It hopes to also develop a rapid diagnostic test, such as finger prick blood test similar to ones used by diabetics to test their blood sugar.
The IMI has a budget of 3.3 billion euros for the decade between 2014 and 2024 and has 46 ongoing projects focused on solving world health crises like obesity, diabetes, cancer and Alzheimer’s disease.
It is the world’s largest public/private life science partnership and as such, is ideally positioned to tackle this year’s deadly Ebola pandemic, which has killed at least 5,000 people in West Africa alone.
The progress made in the vaccination arena looks promising. GlaxoSmithKline and NewLink Genetics currently have two vaccines in human safety trials, and an additional five companies have said they will begin testing their products on humans in the first quarter of 2015. Johnson & Johnson , which will begin its trials in January, has said it will make a million doses of any effective vaccine by the end of next year.
