G-FINDER 2024 Landscape of Emerging Infectious Disease Research & Development report: Lessons Learned

This report examines the evolution of EID R&D funding between 2014, and the West African Ebola Epidemic, and 2022, in the wake of COVID-19. It also includes a look back at pre-2014 Ebola R&D and a preview of how funding evolved in 2023.

The list of diseases we include has grown over time but is not exhaustive and, much like the WHO’s R&D Blueprint for pandemics, does not indicate the most likely cause of the next epidemic.

Our findings include:

• Recent public health emergencies have been caused by diseases not prioritised by the WHO’s R&D Blueprint for epidemics. Zika, Mpox and novel coronaviruses were all considered for inclusion in the 2018 update but were narrowly rejected prior to their respective outbreaks.
• Funding for priority pathogens has grown rapidly since the Blueprint was established, but much of this growth was driven by the establishment of CEPI and post-pandemic changes in funding from the US National Institutes of Health. A comparison with prominent non-priority pathogens suggests the direct impact of the 2018 Blueprint on R&D funding was relatively slight.
• The difficulty of predicting which diseases will cause future outbreaks argues strongly in favour of a diversified investment strategy for R&D preparedness with meaningful funding across a wide range of diseases, products and pathogen families.

Funding

• Funding for most priority pathogens lags far behind the level which was required to create approved vaccines, treatments and diagnostics for Ebola and COVID-19.

Clinical trials

• Based on a crude benchmark against the amount of R&D funding required for Ebola product development, at current levels of funding, it will take more than 50 years before we have access to a full suite of products for all priority pathogens.

• Funding remains dangerously concentrated on COVID, especially on COVID-19 vaccines, which received 42% of global funding in 2022. The lack of a source of short term funds and long term coordination for therapeutics development remains the Achilles heel of our pandemic preparation.

• Traditional clinical trial structures and approaches to limited data are poorly adapted to product development during outbreaks. The failures experienced during Ebola and COVID has prompted valuable new initiatives to streamline product development, but have not addressed the gap between approaches to assessing non-pharmaceutical interventions and biopharmaceuticals.

All our Emerging Infectious Disease R&D funding data is available via our G-FINDER data portal, which can be used to create custom visualisations and further explore areas of interest.

Our 2022 report on the infectious disease R&D funding landscape is available here.