The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation launches New Grand Challenge for Global Health: Vaccine Manufacturing

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is launching a new Grand Challenge: Innovations in Vaccine Manufacturing for Global Markets. Deadline for submitting a Letter of Intent is November 5, 2015. The challenge focusses on innovations in vaccine manufacturing platforms designed to lower production cost for vaccines that target diseases of great global burden and that are among the most costly to produce with current technologies. The challenge does not specify funding limits or expectations. 
Vaccines are one of the most powerful and effective health interventions ever developed, and also provide tremendous economic and societal value in averted costs, productivity gains, and poverty reduction. Yet a number of factors interact to limit complete global immunization coverage, and among those is the cost of procuring and distributing vaccines in lower income countries. A substantial reduction in the cost of manufacturing vaccines could help enable affordable, equitable and sustainable immunization on a global scale, while also enabling manufacturers to develop sustainable business models around such products. To that end, the foundation is soliciting innovative proposals to develop manufacturing platforms that can transform production economics and produce vaccines at a final finished goods production cost of ≤ $0.15 per dose. The proposed research and development will focus on at least one of the following: human papillomavirus, inactivated poliovirus, measles-rubella, pentavalent, pneumococcal, or rotavirus vaccine. The ultimate goal of this challenge is to significantly increase global access to priority vaccines by lowering the manufacturing cost required to produce them.
 
Applications may be submitted by both foreign and domestic organizations, including non-profit organizations, for-profit companies, international organizations, government agencies and academic institutions. The full proposal application deadline (invited proposals only) is February 23, 2016.