CEPI announces new partnerships with AstraZeneca and CSL, Australia to manufacture millions of doses of COVID-19 vaccine candidates

Monday, June 8, 2020

CEPI’s partnership with AstraZeneca

CEPI has partnered with AstraZeneca, providing up to US $383 million in funding to support the manufacture of 300 million doses of their vaccine candidate, AZD1222, developed by the University of Oxford.

AZD1222 has now progressed into late-stage Phase II/III clinical trials, with more than 10,000 volunteers taking part across the UK. CEPI’s initial seed funding supported the early development of this vaccine candidate, helping to advance it to the promising stage of development reached today.

If the vaccine is proven to be safe and effective, the first doses produced under this agreement are anticipated to be available in early 2021, with the full quota of 300 million doses expected by July 2021. Critical to our commitment to ensuring global equitable access, these doses will be ringfenced for the COVID-19 Vaccine Global Access Facility, an instrument of the Vaccines pillar of the ACT Accelerator within which CEPI works, in partnership with Gavi and the World Health Organization. 

This new partnership announcement was made yesterday alongside Gavi’s Global Vaccine Summit 2020. In addition to completing its aim to raise significant funding to support its essential work, the event also served as a platform to launch Gavi’s COVAX Advance Market Commitment (AMC), a separate finance mechanism to ensure vaccine supplies for lower income and lower-middle income countries. AstraZeneca has become the first vaccine manufacturer to sign up to the Gavi COVAX AMC - further details on this new finance mechanism are available on the Gavi website.Read more