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takyon writes:

The Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) will attempt to develop vaccines for Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS), Lassa fever, and Nipah virus within the next five years. CEPI is seeking another half billion dollars of funding at the World Economic Forum:

Scientists have named three relatively little-known diseases they think could cause the next global health emergency. A coalition of governments and charities has committed $460m to speed up vaccine development for Mers, Lassa fever and Nipah virus. They are asking funders at the World Economic Forum Davos for another $500m. The Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations aims to have two new experimental vaccines ready for each disease within five years.

CEPI was formed in the wake of the Ebola crisis to speed up vaccine development:

The devastating Ebola epidemic that erupted in West Africa in 2014 sparked the formation of CEPI. Experimental Ebola vaccines, which have no commercial market, were sitting in laboratory freezers when the epidemic broke out, but they had never been tested in humans. Clinical trials began in haste in September 2014, but vaccine development is a multiphase process that requires first conducting small-scale studies for safety and immune responses in hundreds of people who are not at risk for the disease. Vaccines that pass those tests move on to real-world efficacy trials in thousands of volunteers. By the time an Ebola vaccine proved its worth in July 2015, standard containment efforts had already nearly brought the epidemic to a standstill.

Jeremy Farrar, head of the Wellcome Trust in London, co-authored an influential perspective in the 23 July 2015 issue of The New England Journal of Medicine that spelled out the need for a coordinated global effort to help advance vaccines against menacing infectious diseases that industry ignored because of dodgy markets. The article proposed taking novel vaccines through preliminary human testing before the inevitable outbreaks—an idea that has now evolved into CEPI. "We now have enough money to show the world that this can deliver," says Farrar, who is on the interim CEPI board. CEPI will now solicit proposals from academic researchers and industry to develop candidate vaccines for its three target viruses.

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