0:00
This is Chris Wilson.
I'm the Director of Discovery
& Translational Sciences
at the Bill and Melinda
Gates Foundation
in Seattle, Washington,
United States.
And what I'd like to
speak with you today about
is some future directions
for vaccine discovery
and how innovation
in vaccine discovery
can have a positive impact
on global health inequities.
As most of you may
know, vaccines are
one of the most impactful and
cost-effective public health
measures of the 20th century.
However, there remain
great unmet needs
to develop vaccines for globally
burdensome infectious diseases
and to allow more timely
responses to emerging
infectious disease threats.
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As shown in the cartoon
along the top of this slide,
the path by which new vaccines
are discovered and developed
is challenging and
often long and costly.
In fact, the shortest time taken
from identification of the microbe,
which would be at the far left of
the chevron shown along the top,
to the launch of a vaccine
has been nine years.
And that was the measles vaccine,
which stood on the shoulders, that
is to say, built off of a
precedent established by the Sabin
polio vaccine, thus
making it an easier
process than for most vaccines.
As you can also see, there is at
least one major infectious disease
for which we've identified the
pathogen more than 115 years ago
and still do not have a
vaccine and that is malaria.
Thus historically, the
range of time required
to go from identification of a
pathogen to an effective vaccine
is fundamentally too long.
Even once one has advanced
a potential product
through exploratory and is ready
to take it into development,
8 to 10 years is currently
required for a typical vaccine.
