Innovation and IP incentives are key to preparedness for future pandemics, voluntary partnerships, and high-volume supply.

First, mindful of the time, investments required and risks to develop safe and effective countermeasures, sustaining a thriving innovation ecosystem which fosters a continued drive of innovation ahead of the next pandemic, is of the utmost importance. We want to develop new pandemic countermeasures even faster, as proposed in the 100 Day Mission. Such aspirations require sustaining a thriving innovation ecosystem that can be counted on and guaranteeing fast, certain, and unencumbered access to pathogens and their genetic information.

Intellectual property incentives are critical to this kind of ecosystem on which global health security can depend. They provide the necessary framework that makes at risk investments possible in advance of the next pandemic, as well as facilitating voluntary partnerships, business-to-business agreements, technology transfer to scale up for high volume supply.

This ecosystem is amongst the things that worked well at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and allowed the rapid development and scale-up of vaccines and treatments in record time. The first COVID-19 vaccine was approved for emergency use only 326 days after the genetic sequence of SARS-CoV-2 was released. This was the fastest vaccine development ever, slashing by a fifth the previous record. But next time, we want to react even quicker, in just 100 days after a new pandemic threat is identified. But to do so, a broad and deeply competitive ecosystem must be maintained. It is the mechanism that will allow pharmaceutical companies to face the risks, failures, and uncertainties of future innovations for the development of novel vaccines and therapeutic tools for pandemics and beyond.