African ‘low-cost’ mRNA vaccine will receive further funding from the Gates Foundation

According to the organisation, two businesses will receive $5 million each to purchase the technology required to create regionally appropriate vaccines.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has announced a $40 million financing commitment to expand access to a “low-cost” mRNA vaccine development and production platform for specialised defence against the continent’s different diseases in some parts of Africa.

Quantoom Biosciences, a Belgian biotech business, will get $20 million, according to the non-profit, to “further advance the technology and lower costs for commercialization.” According to the foundation, $5 million would each be given to Biovac in South Africa and the Institut Pasteur de Dakar in Senegal to purchase the technology.

“The Gates Foundation will grant another $10 million to other LMIC [low- and middle-income countries] vaccine manufacturers to be named,” it stated.

The mechanism used in an mRNA vaccination decides which portion of a virus the body’s immune system should attack in order to eradicate a pathogen.

While it is claimed that vaccines produced using mRNA revolutionised the global response to the Covid-19 pandemic, unequal access to care led to efforts to utilise this technology for battling current dangers like malaria and tuberculosis that disproportionately affect lower-income countries.

In order to promote the creation of long-lasting mRNA vaccines, the World Health Organisation (WHO) established a technology transfer hub in Cape Town, South Africa, earlier this year. In order to hasten the regional approval and distribution of mRNA vaccines in LMICs, it also sought to improve regulatory skills. One of the hub’s partners, Afrigen Biologics, is currently developing the first mRNA vaccine for Covid-19 in Africa in a laboratory setting.

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In addition to sponsoring initiatives to eradicate diseases like polio and malaria, the Gates Foundation is the second largest donor to the WHO, according to reports earlier this year. During the Covid-19 pandemic, it heavily invested in the creation of vaccines.

In the absence of effective accountability systems, critics have highlighted worries about the foundation wielding undue power in the global health sector, especially its purported influence within the WHO. Critics claim that Bill Gates, the millionaire founder of Microsoft, has more fortune as a philanthropist than as a businessman. The Gates Foundation has given roughly $250 million in tax-deductible “charitable” grants to businesses in which it held stock, according to a 2020 probe.

The organization’s most recent funding announcement, which it claims comes after a prior $55 million investment in mRNA manufacturing technology, has been warmly received by the African labs it supports as a means of furthering life-saving technological research on the continent.

Amadou Sall, CEO of the Institut Pasteur de Dakar, stated that “expanding our capacity to discover and manufacture affordable mRNA vaccines in Africa is an important and necessary step towards vaccine self-reliance in the region.”