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Epidemic diseases affect all. They do not respect borders. CEPI is a innovative global partnership between public, private, philanthropic, and civil society organisations, who work together to accelerate the development of vaccines against emerging infectious diseases and enable equitable access to these vaccines for people during outbreaks.
Translational Health Science And Technology Institute (THSTI), an autonomous institute of the Department of Biotechnology, has been recognised by CEPI as one of the global network of laboratories for the assessment. Under the CEPI Global network, the laboratory will use the same reagents and follow a common set of protocols to measure the immune response of multiple vaccine candidates under development and trial.
The Department of Biotechnology has been implementing the IndCEPI mission ‘India Centric Epidemic Preparedness through Rapid Vaccine Development: Supporting Indian Vaccine Development’.
More About CEPI
- CEPI is a Norwegian Association. The primary governing body is the Board, which has 12 voting members (four investors and eight independent members representing competencies including industry, global health, science, resource mobilisation, finance) and five observers.
- CEPI was conceived in 2015 and formally launched in 2017 at the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland. CEPI is headquartered in Oslo, Norway.
- CEPI was founded by the governments of Norway and India, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Wellcome Trust, and the World Economic Forum.
- To date, CEPI has secured financial support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Wellcome Trust, the European Commission, and the governments of Australia, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Ethiopia, Germany, Japan, Mexico, Norway and the United Kingdom.
- The Scientific Advisory Committee is an independent body within the CEPI governing structure that provides scientific support, advice, and guidance to the CEPI Board and Secretariat. Final decision making about the issues addressed by the committee rests with the Board or the Secretariat.
- CEPI has been involved in the development and clinical trials of the following vaccines:
. MERS-CoV
. Nipah virus
. SARS-CoV
. Chikungunya virus
. Rift valley fever
. COVID-19
- Many organisations operate within the end-to-end space of vaccine funding and R&D implementation. However, a number of critical gaps have been identified, which CEPI was designed to fill.
. First, CEPI will advance vaccines against known threats through proof-of-concept and safety testing in humans and will establish investigational vaccine stockpiles before epidemics begin—”just in case”.
. Second, it will fund new and innovative platform technologies with the potential to accelerate the development and manufacture of vaccines against previously unknown pathogens (eg: within 16 weeks from identification of antigen to product release for clinical trials)—”just in time”.
. Third, CEPI will support and coordinate activities to improve the collective response to epidemics, strengthen capacity in countries at risk, and advance the regulatory science that governs product development.
- CEPI takes an end-to-end approach, operating as both a funder and a facilitator. They focus on vaccine development, licensure, and manufacturing while supporting the efforts of the partners in vaccine discovery and delivery.
