Sanofi's vaccines division Sanofi Pasteur and Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation have partnered to discover and develop new platforms and methods intended to speed up vaccine R&D, particularly in areas of global health.
Under the Vaccine Discovery Partnership (VxDP), Gates Foundation can directly collaborate with Sanofi Pasteur and other vaccine-pharmaceutical firms across disease areas of interest.
VxDP also provides an integrated, straight-forward and sustained relationship based on a memorandum of understanding (MOU).
Sanofi Pasteur senior vice president of R&D John Shiver the MOU with the Gates Foundation will help to de-risk novel concepts, technologies, platforms, and approaches of mutual interest.
"This program provides a mechanism to pursue R&D of new candidate vaccines for global health in the preclinical and clinical phases up to and including Phase IIa clinical trials," Shiver said.
The partnership enables the Gates Foundation and its pharmaceutical partners to speed up the development of candidate vaccines for use in developing countries, while allowing the pharmaceutical partners to develop and test new technologies that also will advance their other R&D programs.
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation president of Global Health Trevor Mundel said, "This partnership will help accelerate research and development of effective and affordable vaccines that will ultimately benefit the world's poorest people, and I'm pleased that Sanofi is contributing their expertise and resources."
