Rapid COVID-19 Vaccine Development Built on Over $17 Billion in NIH Funding for Vaccine Technologies

Annual project years and project costs associated with NIH-funded PMIDs 2000-2019. Credit: © Center for Science and Industry Integration at Bentley University

A broad base of NIH-funded research into pre-pandemic activation technologies provided a toolkit for the rapid development of COVID vaccines.

The unprecedented development of COVID-19 vaccines less than a year after the discovery of this virus was made possible by more than $ 17 billion in vaccine technology research funded by the NIH prior to the pandemic, according to new research from Bentley University’s Center for Integration of Science and Industry. The article, entitled “NIH Funding for Vaccine Readiness Before the COVID-19 Pandemic,” highlights the critical role this broad-based government-funded research plays in ensuring vaccine readiness.

The report, published today (April 22, 2021) in the journal Vaccine, examined the maturation of research and NIH funding for ten technologies applied in candidate COVID-19 vaccines as of July 2020. The maturation of these technologies was described in 51,530 published research papers from 2000-2019, of which 8,420 (16%) recognize NIH funding totaling $ 17.2 billion. Some of these technologies have been used successfully in vaccines since the mid-20th century. Others, such as the viral vectors used in the Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca vaccines, emerged from genetic engineering in the 1980s and were found to be established before 2010. Still others, including the mRNA technologies used by Pfizer / BioNTech and Moderna, have only recently reached a fixed point.

“Rapid development of COVID vaccines was only possible because companies had access to a toolkit of established technologies,” says Dr. Fred Ledley, Director of the Center for Integration of Science and Industry. “Some of the most recent technologies, including mRNA and viral vectors, have proven particularly well suited to COVID-19 and the timelines required to combat this pandemic. The substantial investments made by the public sector over the past 20 years in the maturation of these technologies must be taken into account in the pricing of these products and their availability to the public. “

“This study also found surprisingly little NIH-funded, published research on vaccines for recognized pandemic threats, such as coronavirus, Zika, Ebola, or dengue virus,” said Dr. Anthony Kiszewski, lead author of the study and associate professor of natural and Applied Science. at Bentley University. “Mechanisms must be developed to fund research into vaccine technologies that accelerate the development of vaccines against emerging threats and prevent future pandemics.”

Reference: “NIH Funding for Vaccination Readiness Before the COVID-19 Pandemic” by Anthony E. Kiszewski, Ekaterina Galkina Cleary, Matthew J. Jackson and Fred D. Ledley, April 22, 2021, Vaccine.
DOI: 10.1016 / j.vaccine.2021.03.022

Dr. Anthony Kiszewski was the lead author of this work, along with Dr. Ekaterina Galkina Cleary, Dr. Matthew Jackson and Dr. Fred Ledley. This work was supported by a grant from the National Biomedical Research Foundation.