IAVI calls for innovative partnerships to sustain vaccine development at the World Vaccine Congress Europe 2025

IAVI’s leading experts joined The World Vaccine Congress (WVC) Europe in Amsterdam from 13-16 October as the global health field continues to reckon with sweeping funding cuts affecting research capacities. IAVI speakers amplified the call for strategic partnerships and funding approaches to mitigate these seismic policy shifts and sustain vaccine research and development (R&D) efforts, especially concerning poverty-related and neglected diseases (PRNDs). Global partnerships underpinned by regional leadership in support of resilient research ecosystems will be critical to realize the full potential on investments in vaccine development. In this summary, we highlight three key calls to action from IAVI’s engagement at the WVC Europe. 

Advance partnerships driven by regional leadership 

Partnerships are the bedrock of vaccine development. Research networks cultivated over decades have equipped us with the partnerships, expertise, and scientific ingenuity needed to bring today’s vaccine pipeline to fruition. IAVI’s unique Product Development Partnership (PDP) model offers one such example. IAVI speakers highlighted how the PDP model effectively mobilizes diverse partners across sectors that may otherwise lack experience or incentive to develop health technologies for underserved markets, helping to derisk development and negotiate equitable access. But in this era of doing more with less, existing models must innovate. 

Political buy-in at national and regional levels is critical, especially in resource-constrained regions. This is all too apparent in Africa, which hosts only 1.1% of clinical trials globally despite being home to almost 20% of the world’s population and carrying a quarter of the global disease burden. Meeting local needs and ensuring real-world and equitable impact requires an end-to-end perspective where local experts and decisionmakers set research priorities that are informed by local epidemiology and policy priorities. 

“IAVI is taking a novel approach to working with regional stakeholders and governments in West Africa to mobilize the resources needed to bring our Lassa fever vaccine candidate into late-stage testing,” said Swati Gupta, vice president and head of emerging infectious diseases and epidemiology at IAVI. “This is critical to overcome the drastic retractions we are seeing in the funding environment”.

Strengthen resilient and adaptive research ecosystems 

Investments in the vaccine development ecosystem should be optimized to ensure that investments in one disease area will generate far-reaching benefits for others, including by strengthening international research networks and infrastructure. Greater harmonization across the product development continuum, including between developers, regulators, and funders, can help ensure this infrastructure is resilient and adaptive to address existing and novel health threats. Alignment of standards and optimization of practices, including for disease surveillance and platform technologies, is key to this end. 

“In the current funding landscape, we need funders to sustainably invest in the infrastructure that is already there for areas beyond the original disease focus, understanding that investments over years are critical to develop these networks and indigenous capacities,” said Kundai Chinyenze, strategic partnerships and Africa regional director, IAVI. “We need pluripotent research sites that are able to do infectious disease research but also capacitated for non-communicable disease research. We also need to see how we can plug into groups like Africa CDC, who have broader mandates to sustain this ecosystem.” 

Position vaccine R&D as an investment, not a cost 

Funding for vaccine R&D against PRNDs remains fragmented, too short in duration, and insufficient for late-stage development. Mobilizing sustained funding in today’s environment necessitates a reframing of how we define return on investments. To move beyond traditional cost-effectiveness measures, we need to better capture the broader structural benefits of vaccines, especially where there is a lack of market incentive. This includes potential gains in economic productivity from reducing morbidity and mortality and developing local research and manufacturing capacity and expertise that contribute to global health security. 

Developing vaccines is also a highly complex endeavour, perhaps none more so than for HIV. Hard-won lessons from pioneering studies to date continue to advance both HIV vaccine development and vaccinology more broadly. Better communicating these intermediate wins along the way can further demonstrate the broad returns on R&D investments. 

“To unlock new types of partnerships and resources, we need to change the narrative of funding global health R&D from being a cost to an investment in health and society,” said Hester Kuipers, IAVI’s executive director, Europe.