 Good afternoon. My name is Ryan Morehart and welcome to our press conference, CEPI, Building a Global Coalition to End Epidemics. Welcome to those here in the room with us at our annual meeting at Davos, and especially welcome to those viewing from around the world, viewing online, hopefully from somewhere nice and warm. The Forum's 2019 Global Risk Report released last week details a new era of epidemic risk, one defined by an increasing number of epidemic events and a society more vulnerable to the related health, security, and economic disruptions. It was in this context that two years ago, here in Davos, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, CEPI, was born. And today we are gathered to share progress that CEPI has made. And so it is our pleasure to welcome, on our panel here, Paul Stoffels, Vice Chairman and Chief Scientific Officer at Johnson & Johnson, Lydia Ogden, Associate Vice President of Global Enterprise Policy at MSD, and Jeremy Farr, Director at Welcome Trust. And finally, Richard Hatchett, the first CEO of CEPI. So Richard, could you get us started? Would you mind introducing CEPI, CEPI's mission and some of the progress that you've made? Sure. Thanks for the introduction, Ryan. It's great to be here today. Two years since CEPI was inaugurated, CEPI was charged with developing vaccines against some of the world's most dangerous diseases. Diseases that WHO has identified as high priority threats. Over the last two years, we've had constant reminders of the importance of our work. In 2018 alone, we have struggled against two outbreaks of Ebola in the Democratic Republic of Congo and are still struggling against the second. We have experienced the most deadly outbreak ever of Lhasa Fever in Nigeria. And we saw NEPA travel more than 2,000 kilometers from the next closest location to cause an outbreak in Kerala, India. In fact, in May and June of 2018, the world contended with simultaneous outbreaks of six of the eight diseases highlighted in the WHO's list of priority epidemic diseases. These included Ebola, MERS, Zika, NEPA, Lhasa Fever, and Rift Valley Fever. Epidemics turn the world upside down. The fear they cause can drive communities to desert the weak, to shun the sick, to bury their dead without ceremony. And epidemics cause economic damage, again driven by fear that can be vastly disproportionate to the level of illness caused. In our hyper-connected world, epidemics have the potential to hop from continent to continent spreading far beyond the places where they emerge. We have seen this over and over again. And the number of outbreaks seems to be increasing for a variety of reasons, ranging from our increased connectivity to high density living in dense cities to increased deforestation and incursions into previously remote areas. As Ryan mentioned, the World Economic Forum has again highlighted biological risks underscoring how they are evolving and transforming in this year's global risk report. WHO has included Ebola and other high-threat pathogens in their list of 10 threats to global health in 2019. We ignore epidemic threats at our peril, and CEPI has proved that the world has not turned its back. In 2017, here in Davos, five investors, Norway, Japan, Germany, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and Welcome, with the support of the Forum and of India, provided CEPI's first contributions. Since that time, the European Commission, Australia, Belgium and Canada have also made contributions. Ethiopia and Rwanda have signed memoranda of understanding with CEPI, and the government of Ethiopia is preparing a financial commitment. In the last few weeks, we have been pleased to announce that both Canada and Australia have renewed their commitments. And today, I am delighted to announce that the United Kingdom has joined CEPI with a generous contribution of 10 million pounds. British science and innovation have long contributed to the fight against disease, and we are already working closely with teams from Oxford and Imperial on potentially game-changing new vaccine technologies, as well as with the UK Vaccine Network and the UK Vaccine Manufacturing Innovation Centre that was announced last month. So what other progress can CEPI point to in the last two years? Two years in, CEPI has nine partnership agreements established with partners ranging from academic institutions to biotech firms to large multinational corporations. Across these partnerships, CEPI is supporting a portfolio of 17 vaccines. We have committed over 270 million U.S. dollars to develop vaccines against NEPA, LASA, MERS and other diseases. In recent weeks, we have expanded the number of pathogens we are working on to five, issuing our third call for proposals and inviting submissions to develop vaccines against chicken gunia and rift valley fever. We have also announced our first investments to tackle disease X, the disease we don't know about, the emerging disease with the potential to cause a pandemic, through partnerships with Imperial College in London and the University of Queensland in Australia. The platform technologies they are working on have the potential to transform the way in which we develop vaccines. If they work and early indications are positive, we are looking at reducing the time it takes to develop vaccines from years to decades to weeks to months. In coming weeks and months, we will be announcing more partnerships to fight disease X, Ebola and other diseases. Soon we will initiate the first clinical trials of vaccines supported by CEPI. This will be a tremendous milestone for the organization, of course, but also more generally for the global fight against epidemic diseases. So in summary, I am pleased to report that CEPI has made great progress since its debut two years ago, and we'll let you hear more about the important work now underway from my colleagues. Super. Thank you, Richard. It's been a busy two years. Indeed. One of the colleagues that you mentioned is certainly Jeremy and the team at Welcome Trust, and Welcome Trust was an integral to the launch of CEPI and all the work since. So Jeremy, what does this progress mean, and in your mind, what are the challenges that remain? Yeah, thanks very much, Ryan, and we should also, as Richard has done, just pay tribute to the role that World Economic Forum played in getting us launched. It doesn't feel like it was just two years ago, and Richard's outlined some of the progress that's been made technically, but perhaps doesn't put it into context quite enough. I think what CEPI has essentially done is it's changed the way that we think about epidemics. You know, it has changed that paradigm. Two years ago, persuading people that you could do research in the context of an epidemic was, people laughed at you. It just was not possible. The thought of pooling resources, because none of us can do this on their own, Welcome Can't Do It, Gates Foundation Can't Do It, Germany, Japan, Norway, we can't do this on our own, but by pooling resources, we have the opportunity to do so. And I was in the Democratic Republic of Congo with Tedros over New Year, and somebody that was there said, you know, having a vaccine changes what was a frightening, fearful condition into something with hope, and that's what a vaccine can do. And for the first time, you've been able to deploy already the Merck vaccine very soon, the J&J vaccine, in DRC, in the surrounding countries, and there is nobody who's been there in any doubt that this is having a major impact on that epidemic. That epidemic, which is probably going on now for six to nine months, would have spread geographically and into some big cities without the impact of the response that's happened. And CEPI's reputation in this area has just changed the way people think about things, and it is staggering to think that's happened in two years. I think it's also important when you put a partnership together, nobody should underestimate the challenges of getting married. Nobody should underestimate the challenges of bringing disparate parties together, but ask yourself in the two years who's left and who of the original partners that joined are still there, and as you heard, Canada and Australia, Belgium all increasing their contributions, the UK joining as Richard's just announced, all of the original partners are there and have remained committed. Merck and J&J critically and all the rest of us, and that's a tribute to Richard's leadership, to the governance, and I think to an appreciation that whilst CEPI hasn't got everything right yet, and there are some real challenges, nevertheless the governance, the structure, the leadership, and still the concept is the right one. And I think CEPI is more important today than it was two years ago, and I think it's laid a great foundation for changing the way we think about the development of vaccines for diseases which we all have to appreciate will never have a true commercial return. Thank you, Jeremy. Thank you for being one of those original partners, and Lydia, MSD is another one of those original partners, and as Jeremy alluded to, also MSD is behind the Ebola vaccine that's been such a game changer in the current response. Could you speak to what it has meant to have a vaccine available? Absolutely, and first I'd just like to underscore everything that Richard and Jeremy just said. We strongly believed at our companies known as Merck in the United States and Canada and MSD around the rest of the world, so don't want any confusion on that point. MSD felt and still does that CEPI is absolutely essential to global health security, and that's why we were involved from the very get-go and remain committed as a partner. Jeremy said it correctly, a vaccine is hope, and our Ebola vaccine, experimental Ebola vaccine, has been used in the current outbreak in DRC to vaccinate approximately 60,000 people as of today. We are fully committed to having a stockpile of 300,000 doses at the ready. We've shipped 100,000 to WHO already, and we'll ship another approximately 120,000 by the end of next month. So we are as excited as anyone on the face of the globe could be to be a part of this incredible partnership and to be able to supply our experimental vaccine in partnership with CEPI, in partnership with the World Economic Forum, in partnership with WHO, and critically in partnership with regulatory authorities in both the United States and in Europe. Without their collaboration, this vaccine could not have been put into production and put into use as quickly as it has been, so we're very grateful for that as well. Thank you, Lydia, and thank you for your leadership. I think we've all seen seeing the headlines that this the vaccine in that intervention has saved countless lives, so it's just a different place to be than where we've been in the past. Paul, you were on the stage two years ago, and you and Johnson and Johnson have been on many of those stages where these global health challenges have been addressed through an innovative public-private cooperation. Could you reflect on CEPI's partnership model that's been kind of behind this progress for two years and what that progress has meant and the path ahead? Yes, I can, and first of all, thank you for organizing this update. CEPI has become and is a very important vehicle in the future of research of vaccines for global health security, and research and development in vaccines is a long-term part. It's not that we do something today and next morning or next year you will have a vaccine. You have to have a sustained research, early stage development, late stage development, combining academic, all the type of research teams with industry in order to get to the final product, and that's where CEPI is such an important catalyst on bringing academic and industry together to get ready for the next set of outbreaks, and we have the, as an industry, we have the vaccine platforms to be able to provide vaccine on a large scale. The scientific community is absolutely needed to tackle so many different pathogens. With CEPI we have engaged together with Oxford in base in the new research on MERS, LASA, and NEPA funded by CEPI, and with that we brought together a very strong research team, the platforms we have and the production capabilities to bring forward three vaccines. One MERS was already in a very good stage at Oxford in order to take on the next stage. We provide a vaccine platform to upscale it up to phase two so that we can get to a clinical trial as soon as somewhere there is a clinical outbreak which where it could be could be used, and that's especially the CEPI approach. It's also thanks to the UK government initiative on putting up a vaccine production platform which could host this type of vaccines, and that's a quite significant investment from the UK government in order to also, I think, an ideal situation to have the production available. LASA, NEPA is an early stage there. We have to start preclinical research. It will take some time before we have the next step and also there if that is positive CEPI we'll step back in to see how we can further collaborate. We are working together since a long time on Ebola. Ebola has been a research part for us for more than 10 years in order to get to a vaccine which can be widely used in healthcare work as well in a large population. Today we are in a stage that we have done a clinical trial to get away support from the US government from IMI and soon from CEPI on how we can expand in the region. We have vaccinated more than 6,000 people, have done all the animal rule work in order to get the approval with Europe and the US, and we will make our vaccine available. We have about 6 million, sorry, 1.6 million vaccines available currently and we have a vaccine production platform which can increase that very quickly if one day it would be needed. Why Prime Boost? We worked on a vaccine for the long-term protection of healthcare workers and focused on safety and long-term protection. We have the production platform but also worked on stability with the help of international funders where we can bring a normal refrigeration temperatures two to eight Celsius for one year and it's stable in the normal vaccine system. So you have to think about so many things if you want to bring vaccines to the global field and that's now in state of discussion with regulatory authorities and the WHO on how we can deploy that on a larger scale in the region for Ebola. But this would not happen if would not have happened and the whole of this vaccine activities would not have happened without this extreme collaboration between government, Welcome Trust Gates Foundation, many other institutions as well as the industry and I think it serves as an example on how to solve global public health issues which are of major concern to the world. Thank you Paul and thank you to each of our panelists. I think at this point we are remaining time we'd like to turn to the room to see if there are any questions here in the room and if you do have a question we ask that you would please state your name and your affiliation before addressing our panelists. Seeing none would be remiss if we didn't ask if any of the panelists had one or two more messages they would like to convey to our to our audience. Sure I'll start. I think Paul spoke eloquently to the challenges of addressing vaccine development against these diseases. He spoke about the partnership between industry the critical partnership between industry governments academia. Jeremy reflected on his visit to the DRC and the challenges of actually delivering vaccines in a very complicated environment. I just want to underscore one more thing about CEPI which is you know we I spoke in my comments mainly about the activities that CEPI has funded and undertaken relating to vaccine development and that is a critical part of CEPI as an organization as a product development partnership. CEPI is also the C in CEPI stands for coalition and and the coalition aspect of what CEPI is doing is critically important. We do bring together partners to the table that are beyond you know the the part of CEPI that funds vaccine development. I just returned from a week in Nigeria Nigeria CDC hosted the the first international Lhasa fever conference last week and had over 600 researchers 100 investigators from other parts of Africa outside of Nigeria traveled to the conference 200 international participants and we had an opportunity to convene CEPI's joint coordination group which is our our round table of partners. It includes multilateral partners like WHO like Gavi like UNICEF the IFRC. We were able to take our vaccine manufacturers who are working on Lhasa vaccines including Oxford the partner with with Jonson and to meet with representatives of of Nigerian government the regulatory bodies the ethical review boards to discuss collectively how we can collectively take responsibility for these products and I think the idea that CEPI puts forward is that we all have collective responsibility. CEPI as a funding body cannot do this by itself it cannot do this without the partnership of our industry partners with Merck Jonson's with the biotech firms with our academic partners with other funders like like welcome and that and that to address these truly global threats we do have to respond to them as a global community and we've tried to embody that. I think the success of the model to date which has generated a lot of promise we have a lot of work to do there are many challenges ahead as as Jeremy said I think speaks to the validity of of the model of of gathering in and working together that's right that's right we do have a question please let's get a microphone no I think we're happy please sorry Sophie Edwards from DevEx a question for you Richard um you mentioned a partnership with Ethiopia it would be great to just hear a bit more detail about that how that's going to work and also how um how do you select which things you're working on is there sort of outside pressure to maybe include some other things like influenza and how do you sort of navigate those? Sure so let me let me speak to the question about Ethiopia first I think I think we are working with Ethiopia to to figure out how their commitment will work they do want to join SEPI as a full member of the coalition and that that actually entails making a contribution to the common pool of funding we think it's incredibly important that again speaking to this idea of a global coalition this is this is not a problem that just Western funders or rich nations can solve it is it is critically important to have partners who are potentially affected by these diseases almost uniformly of which are lower and middle income countries that's that's where emerging diseases tend to emerge be part of SEPI be part of its governance. Ethiopia does actually face risk from a number of the diseases that SEPI is working on now that we've added rift valley fever that that's also a consideration we we know that MERS is present in camel populations in in Ethiopia we do not know because of weak surveillance whether there are human cases there but Ethiopia responded very favorably to our initial overtures and did express interest there in ambitious countries they want to build a biotechnology industry they host the african union they host africa cdc the director of africa cdc is a SEPI board member so that the linkages were natural and we are we are working with them through some currency issues to figure out how they they can be fully contributing members to the partnership the second question very briefly you asked how we selected the agents that we've worked on I think we take our lead from the global leader in this space which is the world health organization they and through their R&D blueprint for action against epidemic disease have identified high priority pathogens and urgent pathogens MERS, LASA, NEPA and RIFT are all among among the highest priority pathogens chikungunya is a is a disease that they have also expressed that the world needs to make progress on so we have followed their lead we've had to down select from the total list just because of constraints of resources at present so I'll stop there thank you Richard Lydia you had a point too and then Paul yeah I I just wanted to add that the the use of our experimental Ebola vaccine in DRC I think is the backdrop is the volatility of viruses but also the unpredictability of the environments in which they may need to be used and looking back at the unprecedented rapidity with which our experimental vaccine was developed and deployed we are very very hopeful that this will be a new model for developing and quickly deploying life-saving vaccines life-saving hope as Jeremy said earlier I think what you say is very important for industry to to to participate in this today we develop cancer drugs in the west in three years yeah from the first clinical results to getting it out to patients this is a global health security we have to get the regulatory part and the clinical pathway to get this done very clear and that will give us a very good view on what we have to do and what we can expect when we are investing because typically we as companies co-investing getting this done it will be much clearer on and bringing more partners on board to to get this going and there the world has to align between FDA EMA the World Health Organization and all the constituents who are involved on a very clear pathway for for how to move forward and in the development pathway so I think this is when you Ryan at the start you asked what are the what are the what's it going to look like in the future I mean I would characterize that sepi has come onto the scene there's no doubt it's changed the dynamic and the language around what's used and it's invested in a series of of what look like very exciting pipelines and others to develop new vaccines sepi will truly have succeeded though if it changes the way we all think about the R&D of of vaccines to begin with at least and Paul's comment there and Lydia's about unless we think of this as from start to finish which means realigning the regulatory pathways the the access issues and you know complicated things like intellectual property and and pricing unless we think of it in the round and sepi given that its trusted status now is the forum I believe which can bring people together and have those debates it's a technical body funding R&D but it's also a body that's a forum to bring all of those parties together and in truth that doesn't exist anywhere else and I think in the long term sepi's greatest contribution will be developing the vaccines but it will also be in changing the way we think about their development thank you Jeremy and I think what we can then plan to do is is reconvene here and visit that progress as the sepi continues to catalyze those activities I think we've seen that thanks to sepi there's now a different set of expectations we've changed the conversation and so we'll continue to catalyze those those activities that now the world expects so now it's time to deliver and thank you to those on the panel who have delivered so far and we appreciate the update and learning of the progress thank you