R&D

Mastercard Partners With Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Wellcome to Speed Development and Access to Therapies for COVID-19

Mastercard

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Wellcome and Mastercard announced on March 10 a commitment of up to $125 million in seed funding to speed-up the response to the COVID-19 epidemic by identifying, assessing, developing, and scaling-up treatments. The partners are committed to equitable access, including making products available and affordable in low-resource settings. The COVID-19 Therapeutics Accelerator will play a catalytic role by accelerating and evaluating new and repurposed drugs and biologics to treat patients with COVID-19 in the immediate term, and other viral pathogens in the longer-term. Currently there are no broad-spectrum antivirals or immunotherapies available for the fight against emerging pathogens, and none approved for use on COVID-19.

The COVID-19 Therapeutics Accelerator will work with the World Health Organization, government and private sector funders and organizations, as well as the global regulatory and policy-setting institutions. The Accelerator will have an end-to-end focus, from drug pipeline development through manufacturing and scale-up. By sharing research, coordinating investments, and pooling resources, these efforts can help to accelerate research. This kind of collaboration was a key lesson from the 2014 Ebola outbreak. By providing fast and flexible funding at key stages of the development process, the Accelerator will de-risk the pathway for new drugs and biologics for COVID-19 and future epidemic threats, ensuring access in lower-resource countries.

While antiviral drugs are approved to lessen the severity of seasonal flu and treat HIV, among other viral diseases, none have demonstrated efficacy against the current epidemic. One reason for the lack of effective treatments is that products may not have an immediate market, which can slow or prevent their research and commercial development. The COVID-19 Therapeutics Accelerator is designed to help by bringing together resources and expertise to lower the financial and technical risk for academia, biotech, and pharmaceutical companies, while ensuring that these products are accessible and affordable to people in low-resource settings. The expertise of pharmaceutical companies will be critical in identifying, researching, and commercializing successful drugs.

“We’re proud to join this crucial effort to combat COVID-19 in furtherance of our commitment to inclusive growth,” said Mike Froman, vice chairman of Mastercard. “This global challenge not only represents a risk to the health and safety of populations all over the world, but also poses a potential disruption to the economic vitality of millions of people, businesses, and organizations worldwide. Our experience with financial inclusion shows us the importance of building a network of parties who bring not only their capital, but complementary assets and skill sets to the table, and we welcome other partners concerned about inclusive growth to join this effort.”

For the full story, please visit Mastercard’s press page.

Intel & Lenovo Work Together to accelerate the analysis of coronavirus genome in vaccine search

Intel & Lenovo

Lenovo, the world’s top producer of supercomputers as well as PCs, is teaming up with electronic chip giant Intel and a China-based life science company in an effort to speed up analysis of the coronavirus genome and thus find a means to “save more lives” by possibly accelerating vaccine development.

“The epidemic of new coronavirus pneumonia affects the hearts of people across the country. Lenovo, as the world ’s leading HPC [high-performance computing] manufacturer, has been committed to providing computing support for life science research,” said Tong Fuyao, senior vice president of Lenovo Group and president of its Enterprise Technology Group.

“Big data analysis and health and life science experts from Intel and Lenovo will integrate our resources and expertise to help solve the serious challenges currently facing and advance the development of health and life sciences.”

Originally published on WRAL TechWire (March 2020). You can read more here.