Aligning to Accelerate R&D Pipelines
Assorted health technologies
Photo credit: Marta Branco)
The Gates Foundation is committed to driving transformative impact in global health and gender equality. Its strategies support the research and development (R&D) and delivery of new life-saving innovations that can make a significant health impact in low- and middle-income countries. With priorities that include HIV, TB, malaria, enteric diseases, neglected tropical diseases, polio, women’s health, and maternal and child health, the foundation is taking a broad approach to address major health barriers.
Amid a rapidly changing global financing landscape, the foundation engaged Adduna Health Partners to analyze its late-stage global health and gender equality R&D portfolios and to develop a landscape of existing and potential funders who share similar priorities. Robust R&D pipelines coupled with the significant expense of late-stage product development mean that new partnerships and commitments are needed to fund the development of promising new innovations, while delivering existing high-impact health technologies in parallel.
Adduna Health Partners provided support by bringing together experts from across Gates Foundation teams to advance the ALIGN project, a novel approach to portfolio and financing analyses that supported internal alignment and decision-making. Deliverables included a comprehensive database identifying late-stage priority innovations and associated financing requirements as well as a funder landscape. The project also took deep dives into several innovations, generating compelling narratives to support future investments. Finally, the Adduna team prepared a set of recommendations to the foundation to promote sustainable data collection, analyses, and alignment in the future.
Over the past twenty-five years, the Gates Foundation has made countless important contributions in developing new lifesaving technologies to improve global health and gender equality. Findings from the ALIGN project can support the foundation’s future planning as it makes new investments and partnerships that advance novel innovations in the next two decades. Our hope is that the ALIGN project can promote timely decision-making, reduce unnecessary financing delays, and secure productive partnerships to ensure that promising innovations in late-stage pipelines can be licensed and made available as soon as possible.