13 Accelerating Vaccine Development: The 100 Days Mission

This chapter explores the role of the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) in global health preparedness and response. It specifically focuses on emergency research response and the 100 Days Mission—the goal of having vaccines ready for use with initial emergency authorization within 100 days from the identification of a novel pathogen with pandemic potential. If this can be accomplished, the world will have a better chance of containing or controlling future infectious disease outbreaks and averting global pandemics or at least minimizing their consequences. Meeting this timeline would require advances in scientific research, production technology, clinical trial readiness, governance and coordination, financing, and the policy ecosystems within which such preparedness and response efforts take place. A “second 100 days” must follow, with the goal of scaling up global vaccine production and delivering vaccines equitably to the world’s population and preventing excess morbidity and mortality as broadly as possible. Multiple countries have followed CEPI’s lead in developing plans consistent with the 100 Days Mission to accelerate vaccine development and delivery. The key to achieving such a goal is a rapid, coordinated research response to smaller outbreaks and epidemics. Smaller responses build the infrastructure and provide practice for testing products quickly in a new crisis, while revealing gaps and generating relevant data to strengthen a bidirectional relationship between preparedness and response.