$125M effort to find coronavirus drugs started by Gates Foundation, Wellcome, and Mastercard
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, along with the charitable group Wellcome and Mastercard, announced Tuesday that they were launching a $125 million effort to speed up the development of drugs to treat the novel coronavirus.
The initiative, known as the Covid-19 Therapeutics Accelerator, will not be enough to develop even a single new medicine. But Trevor Mundel, the president of the Gates Foundation, said the funding could provide important funds to companies and academic researchers immediately, before government funding will be available. Mundel estimates that two dozen companies, evenly divided between large pharmaceutical firms and small biotechs, could be involved in the effort.
