The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is ratcheting up its war on one of the world's top killers with a $75 million grant to help speed development of pneumonia vaccines.
The goal is to provide vaccines for less than $5 a dose in poor countries, where the disease kills about one million children a year.
With the $75 million grant, PATH, a Seattle-based organization that is deeply involved with the foundation's efforts to improve global health, hopes to spur development of vaccines tailored to the pneumonia strains prevalent in the developing world.
The program will also work to accelerate clinical testing of the drugs and encourage construction of manufacturing plants in Africa and Asia to produce the vaccine locally.
In the United States and other developed nations, an adult pneumonia vaccine has been widely available for more than a decade and a children's version was introduced about 5 years ago. But at $50 a dose, the drug would be out of reach of impoverished families in Africa and Asia, even if it were available there.
[The Seattle Times]
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