Vaccines for diseases like Marburg are notoriously difficult to develop and are expected to be expensive. And because outbreaks have been sporadic and mostly in poor countries, big drug companies see little economic incentive to get involved.
“Basically, there’s no profitable market for this vaccine, which is one of the reasons big companies aren’t involved,” said Mark Feinberg, CEO of nonprofit vaccine developer IAVI. told POLITICO.
Organizations like IAVI work to transform promising scientific discoveries in infectious diseases into affordable, life-saving treatments and vaccines, filling the gap left by the private sector. This trend has accelerated in recent decades, with nonprofit organizations funding the development of promising treatments in laboratories and small businesses, or developing them themselves.
The Sabin Vaccine Institute falls into the latter category. The institute acquired the rights to the Marburg vaccine candidate from GSK in 2019 and received $235 million in funding from the U.S. Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Agency (BARDA) for research targeting Ebola and Marburg vaccines. Developed.
This is an approach that upends the traditional market model in which large pharmaceutical companies acquire promising candidates for clinical development. However, it is effective against neglected diseases. Over the weekend, the institute delivered 700 doses of its vaccine candidate to the Rwanda Biomedical Center for trials on the most vulnerable frontline health workers in the outbreak.
Sabin CEO Amy Finan told POLITICO, citing the speed of the development from Rwanda’s initial request to the vaccine’s arrival 10 days later, “We have no reason to believe we can’t continue to respond as it is.” No,” he said.
