On Mar. 25, 2020, a consortium of life sciences companies announced an important collaboration to accelerate the development, manufacture, and delivery of vaccines, diagnostics, and treatments for COVID-19. The life sciences industry brings a range of assets, resources, and expertise needed to identify effective and scalable solutions to the pandemic, which is affecting billions worldwide.

The impact on health systems, economies, and livelihoods is profound, and an effective response requires an unprecedented collaboration across governments, academia, the private sector, and the philanthropic community.

Trials of existing drugs, diagnostic tests, compounds, and investigational vaccines have begun across the globe to identify interventions that could slow or end the pandemic. Products that demonstrate efficacy will require clinical study, scale up of manufacturing, and distribution if proven effective. The life sciences industry has extensive experience in managing these processes for products that reach billions of people every day.

Following a conference call with Gates Foundation leadership earlier this month, companies are working to identify concrete actions that will accelerate treatments, vaccines, and diagnostics to the field. As a first step, 15 companies have agreed to share their proprietary libraries of molecular compounds that already have some degree of safety and activity data with the COVID-19 Therapeutics Accelerator—launched by the Gates Foundation, Wellcome, and Mastercard two weeks ago—to quickly screen them for potential use against COVID-19. Successful hits would move rapidly into in vivo trials in as little as two months.

Companies participating in the collaboration include Bayer, BD, bioMérieux, Boehringer Ingelheim, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Eisai, Eli Lilly, Gilead, GSK, Johnson & Johnson, Merck (known as MSD outside the U.S. and Canada), Merck KGaA, Novartis, Pfizer, and Sanofi.