The big global health R&D funding stories of 2024

Impact Global Health's Compass initiative tracks the significant funding announcements made each year and looks at the implications they have for the future of global health R&D. Here's our round up of the big stories of 2024:

A large grant to chemical vector control products to tackle malaria

Funding for malaria vector control R&D was bolstered considerably by a 2024-2029 $85m grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to the Innovative Vector Control Consortium (IVCC). This is the largest single grant from Gates to IVCC ever recorded. The grant is aimed at ensuring the long term sustainability of vector control as a component of malaria eradication through the development of novel insecticides and other vector control tools.

We can expect to see more funding going into TB vaccine research over the coming years, with a peak in 2025

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has committed $844m to its affiliate research institute, Gates Medical Research Institute, with an expected $400m of this going to the Phase III trial of M72/AS01E. Well over a year into the 2023-2026 grant, only around $133m has been disbursed, which means that a lot of funding is still to come GMRI's way for TB vaccine research in the next two years. We expect to see this peak in 2025. Along with the Gates Foundation, Wellcome has committed over £125m to the Phase III trial of M72/AS01E in a 10 year grant which runs to 2033.

TB drugs research has also received a boost

For the first time, we have recorded funding from the United States Department of Defense to TB Alliance. A 2024-2028 $7.35m grant was awarded by the Congressionally Directed Medical Research Programs (CDMRP) for R&D exploring host-directed approaches for treating tuberculosis.

The Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine (UK) receives fresh commitments to R&D for snakebite envenoming

Biologics R&D for snakebite envenoming, which only received a global total of $8.1m in 2023, received a fresh $17m commitment from Wellcome in 2024. The six-year 'Multi-centre Antivenom Trial in Africa' project is led by Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine across ten sites in sub-Saharan Africa. This is also the first time that Open Philanthropy has funded snakebite envenoming R&D. They have also awarded the Liverpool School a $5.5m five year grant to support a Phase II clinical trial for the only two drugs in clinical development to treat snakebite - unithiol and marimastat.

Drug-related platform technologies benefit from a big grant

Schrödinger have been awarded $19.5m by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to use their platform to accelerate drug discovery for neglected diseases. Schrödinger's main focus is computationally-driven molecular discovery for drug development and materials applications. The two year grant, covering 2024-2026, is to develop computational models for ADMET prediction to accelerate drug discovery for infectious diseases that disproportionately impact low and middle income countries

In April, relative newcomer LifeArc announced a bigger collaboration with FIND to help eliminate visceral leishmaniasis in Kenya

Reported for the first time in this year’s G-FINDER survey is the 2023 funding from new entrant LifeArc, who officially launched their global health strategy in 2023 to fund research tackling antimicrobial resistance, neglected tropical diseases, and emerging viral threats. Our Compass initiative tracked a bigger collaboration announced in April this year of a 2024-2027 £5.9m commitment to FIND to improve diagnostic testing and early access to treatment for visceral leishmaniasis in Kenya.

New support which will be examined further in the 2024 G-FINDER survey

Wellcome has renewed their core award to the Kenya Medical Research Institute (KEMRI) by £91m for another seven years. We've not yet determined how much will be spent on neglected disease R&D - this will become clear through the G-FINDER survey - but the grant has been included in the Compass dataset in the meantime.