New COVID vaccines, treatments: Feds begin doling out portion of $5 billion for future care
The Biden administration announced Tuesday that it is allocating $1 billion for midstage COVID-19 vaccine trials to begin this fall, $300 million for the development of a new monoclonal antibody to protect people who are immunocompromised, and $100 million to explore new technologies to help prevent and treat the infection.
The administration had said it intended to spend $5 billion on Project NextGen to help develop new tools to protect against COVID-19. These are the first specific allocations from that pot of money.
The $1 billion will be split among four smaller biotechnology companies that might otherwise struggle to afford the large cost of a clinical trial comparing their newer vaccines against currently available ones, Dawn O'Connell, assistant secretary for preparedness and response, said in a news conference with reporters Tuesday.
The government has not yet chosen the vaccine candidates it will support from each company, so O'Connell said she could not yet provide more details about each.
The companies are ICON Government and Public Health Solutions Inc., of Hinckley, Ohio;Pharm-Olam LLC, of Houston; Technical Resources Intl (TRI) Inc., of Bethesda,Maryland; and Rho Federal Systems Inc., of Durham, North Carolina.
Those trials are set to begin this winter.
A trial for a monoclonal antibody is expected to begin this fall, she said. With changes in the virus, previous monoclonal antibodies, including one that protected against future infections for as long as six months, no longer worked. The new monoclonal, which is being developed by Regeneron, would replace that antibody and would be intended to prevent infection in people with compromised immune systems in whom vaccines have limited effectiveness.
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Broadening the nation's COVID medicine cabinet
The combination of new vaccines and an antibody, O'Connell said, would "broaden the nation's medicine cabinet … strengthening us for whatever the COVID-19 virus brings next."
Another $100 million will go to to Global Health Investment Corp., a nonprofit organization managing the government's Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority Ventures investment portfolio. The aim will be to expand investments in new technologies.
A final $10 million was allocated to Johnson & Johnson Innovation (JLABS) for a competition through BlueKnight, a BARDA-JLABS partnership.
The administration is meeting with other companies and will announce more funding allocations before the end of the government's fiscal year on Sept. 30, O'Connell said.
The purpose of Project NextGen is to "make sure we're ready for whatever comes around the corner," Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra said at the news conference. "We don't want to wait until we get to the corner to figure out what that is. NextGen is to help us get ahead of this."
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Becerra just returned from a G20 summit in India where he and his counterparts from 20 other countries met to begin developing a coordinated plan to prevent future pandemics.
Contact Karen Weintraub at kweintraub@usatoday.com.
Health and patient safety coverage at USA TODAY is made possible in part by a grant from the Masimo Foundation for Ethics, Innovation and Competition in Healthcare. The Masimo Foundation does not provide editorial input.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: $1B for new COVID vaccines, $300M for new antibody to protect vulnerable
