The Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) on Tuesday announced a $200 million programme for developing the vaccines will promise a broad protection against SARS-CoV-2 variants and other beta coronaviruses. CEPI will provide fund amounting $19.3 million to support the development of a ‘variant-proof’ SARS-CoV-2 vaccine candidate to an international multi-disciplinary consortium that included Bharat Biotech International (India), ExcellGene SA, Switzerland, and the University of Sydney, Australia
Although the world has made advances in vaccine development, variants remain the cause of concern. The new variants that more transmissible, life-threatening and can evade the protection provided by the vaccines developed can create challenges. Hence, it is important to develop novel vaccines that can protect against multiple variants of the SARS-CoV-2 virus and have the potential to generate immunity against all of them.
CEPI will fund the researchers to conduct various activities including immunogen design, preclinical studies, manufacturing process development and a Phase-1 clinical trial.
