The Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) is a foundation that takes donations from public, private, philanthropic, and civil society organisations, to finance independent research projects to develop vaccines against emerging infectious diseases (EID).
CEPI is focused on the World Health Organization's (WHO) "blueprint priority diseases", which include: the Middle East respiratory syndrome-related coronavirus (MERS-CoV), the Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), the Nipah virus, the Lassa fever virus, and the Rift Valley fever virus, as well as the Chikungunya virus and the hypothetical, unknown pathogen "Disease X". CEPI investment also requires "equitable access" to the vaccines during outbreaks, although subsequent CEPI policy changes may have compromised this criterion. In 2022, CEPI adopted a vision for the world to be able to respond to a pandemic threat with a new vaccine within 100 days.
CEPI was conceived in 2015 and formally launched in 2017 at the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland. It was co-founded and co-funded with US$460 million from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Wellcome Trust, and the governments of India and Norway, and was later joined by the European Union (2019) and the United Kingdom (2020). CEPI is headquartered in Oslo, Norway.
History
Founding
The concept for CEPI was outlined in a July 2015 paper in The New England Journal of Medicine, titled "Establishing a Global Vaccine-Development Fund", co-authored by British medical researcher Jeremy Farrar (a director of Wellcome Trust), American physician Stanley A. Plotkin (co-discoverer of the Rubella vaccine), and American expert in infectious diseases Adel Mahmoud (developer of the HPV vaccine and rotavirus vaccine).
Their concept was further expanded at the 2016 WEF in Davos, where it was discussed as a solution to the problems encountered in developing and distributing a vaccine for the Western African Ebola virus epidemic. Co-founder and funder, Bill Gates said: "The market is not going to solve this problem because epidemics do not come along very often — and when they do you are not allowed to charge some huge premium price for the tools involved". CEPI's creation was also supported and co-funded by the pharmaceutical industry including GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), with CEO Sir Andrew Witty explaining at the WEF, "It is super-disruptive when the red phone rings in our vaccine division because of a health emergency. People do not realise that there's no spare capacity in the world's vaccine production system today".
CEPI was formally launched at the 2017 WEF in Davos, with an initial investment of US$460 million by a consortium that included the governments of Norway, Japan, and Germany, The Wellcome Trust, and the Gates Foundation; India joined a short time afterwards. In a launch interview with the Financial Times (FT), Gates said that a key goal was to reduce the time to develop vaccines from 10 years to less than 12 months.
The initial targets were the six EID viruses with known potential to cause major epidemics, being: MERS, Lassa fever, Nipah virus, Ebola, Marburg fever and Zika. The FT reported CEPI would "build the scientific and technological infrastructure for developing vaccines quickly against pathogens that emerge from nowhere to cause a global health crisis, such as Sars in 2002/03 and Zika in 2015/16", and fund research papers on the costs and process of vaccine development. Town & Country listed it as one of the top-10 newsworthy moments from the 2017 Davos. At launch, Norwegian physician John-Arne Røttingen, who led the steering committee for Ebola vaccine trials, served as interim CEO, and CEPI was based at the Norwegian Institute of Public Health in Oslo.
In April 2017, Richard J. Hatchett, former director of the U.S. government's Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), became the full-time CEO. Hatchett was also a member of the United States Homeland Security Council under George W. Bush, and the United States National Security Council, under Barack Obama. Also in April 2017, CEPI opened an additional office in London, and in October 2017, a further office was opened in Washington, D.C. Nature later stated, "It is by far the largest vaccine development initiative ever against viruses that are potential epidemic threats".
In 2020, CEPI was identified by several media outlets as a "key player in the race to develop a vaccine" for coronavirus disease 2019.