The United Kingdom and other leading Western countries are providing £750m (€1130m; $1460m) to speed up the development of a vaccine against pneumococcal disease, one of the leading causes of death among children in the developing world.
It is expected that the fund, which is backed by Italy, the UK, Norway, Russia, and Canada as well as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, will pay for 100 million vaccinations and could prevent 5.4 million deaths by 2030.
The chancellor of the exchequer, Gordon Brown, was among a number of leading ministers in Rome last week at the official launch of the scheme, which aims to create a market for much needed vaccines and drugs in developing countries by underwriting the costs of their development and production.
The vaccine against pneumococcal disease, the first developed under the scheme, should be available by 2010. But it is hoped that a similar approach, known as an advanced market commitment, could be applied to develop vaccines for malaria, tuberculosis, and even HIV in the future.
Pneumococcal disease is the leading cause of pneumonia and the second leading cause of meningitis, and it kills nearly a million children in poor countries each year.
Mr Brown said that the advanced market mechanism meant that “instead of high cost, low volume drug production as in the past, we can have high volume, low cost production of drugs in the future and ensure that the many will not be denied the medical advances available to the few.”
An early version of the pneumococcal vaccine is already available in developed countries and is highly effective. But drug manufacturers lack the capacity—and incentive—to develop a vaccine that would combat the additional strains of the disease that prevail in the developing world.
It is hoped that the advanced market commitment will provide the catalyst needed to persuade manufacturers to produce vaccines earlier than would otherwise be the case and at an affordable price. The scheme offers a financial commitment to subsidise future purchases of vaccines, up to a pre-agreed price, provided that developing countries ask for them. The funding is expected to continue for seven to 10 years.
The new vaccines could reach developing countries by 2010—at least 10 years earlier than if the commitment were not available, said Julian Lob-Levyt, executive secretary of the GAVI Alliance (formerly the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation), a worldwide partnership aimed at boosting childhood immunisation.
“Today's decision will save lives by bolstering efforts to prevent this disease, while paving the way for future AMCs [advanced market commitments] focused on other deadly diseases,” Mr Lob-Levyt said.
The new initiative could have a big effect on the United Nations' millennium development goal on child health, which aims to cut the number of avoidable childhood deaths by two thirds by 2015. Currently only 10% of the more than $100bn spent globally on health is devoted to diseases responsible for 90% of health problems. Just 16 of 1400 new drugs developed between 1975 and 1999 were for these diseases.