Bill Gates has teamed up with the London-based Wellcome Trust to pledge up to $100 million (£77 million) to develop coronavirus treatments.
The Covid-19 Therapeutics Accelerator project will focus on new and repurposed drugs that can be used straight away to treat patients.
No antiviral drugs or other immune system treatments have yet been approved to treat Covid-19. Last week Mr Gates, right, co-founder of Microsoft, said promising efforts were being made to find vaccines “ready for larger-scale trials as early as June”.
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Wellcome Trust are each contributing up to $50 million, while the Mastercard Impact Fund has committed up to $25 million for initial projects.
The money is intended to ensure that treatments will be available in poor countries and affordable for individuals.
Mark Suzman, chief executive of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, said: “Viruses like Covid-19 spread rapidly, but the development of vaccines and treatments to stop them moves slowly.
If we want to make the world safe from outbreaks like Covid-19, particularly for those most vulnerable, we need to make research and development move faster.
That requires governments, private enterprise and philanthropic organisations to act quickly to fund research and development.”
