Norway-based Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) and the Brighton Collaboration, based at The Task Force for Global Health, have announced the expansion of a partnership contributing to the safety of future vaccines to prevent and respond to pandemics.

The CEPI-funded Safety Platform for Emergency Vaccines (SPEAC), managed by the Brighton Collaboration, provides crucial scientific expertise from an international network of vaccine safety experts to CEPI-backed projects.  The team played a key role during the development and roll-out of COVID-19 vaccines through the Brighton Collaboration’s efforts to create harmonized guidelines for collection of data on potential side effects.

The renewed partnership will see CEPI provide up to $23 million over four years to broaden the scope of the Safety Platform for Emergency vACcines (SPEAC) programme to deliver world-leading vaccine safety guidance and support for CEPI’s 5-year strategy – known as CEPI 2.0 – and the organisation’s 100 Days Mission which aims to compress the development of new vaccines against pathogens with pandemic potential to just 100 days.

SPEAC will continue its ongoing work to support the safety assessment of vaccines and platforms in the CEPI portfolio, and will implement additional projects building on the lessons of its work to date. These include developing guidance and tools to safely enable earlier inclusion of special populations, such as pregnant women, into clinical trials; and supporting the digital transformation of vaccine safety endpoint definitions and tools by building a mobile application for the collection of safety data during early use of new vaccines.