Background
WHO’s Product Development for Vaccines Advisory Committee (PDVAC) was convened for its 6th annual meeting on 26-28th June 2019. In recent years, the strategic role of PDVAC has evolved to look beyond the most expeditious route to licensure for priority vaccine and technology candidates, and to anticipate the near- and long-term to investment in product development. It is increasingly seeking to develop approaches to ensure country engagement in R&D priorities and to establish a clearer understanding of country preferences, to guide development of products that meet the needs of low and middle-income countries.
This meeting took place in the context of development of the immunization agenda for 2030, and work is underway across global and regional stakeholders to define strategic goals for the next decade. With this in mind, day one of the PDVAC 2019 meeting was dedicated to discussion of the strategic themes for determining R&D priorities and goals for 2021-30, and covered aspects such as the definition and strategies to quantitate vaccine value, improving country engagement in determining R&D priorities and overcoming the various ‘valleys of death’ along the road to vaccine licensure, policy, financing and uptake. These perspectives were brought into the pathogen-specific discussions that followed on days 2 and 3. Due to the increasing number of topics that PDVAC covers, only those pathogen areas and cross-cutting topics for which there were significant new data or strategies were discussed in the meeting. The remaining topics were reviewed at a higher level in the ‘Year in Review’ summary, in most cases to provide updates for information. Finally, PDVAC convened for a closed session to formulate its recommendations, which where appropriate, are captured following each topic in this summary report.
Executive summaries of the meetings as well as the agenda, list of participants and presentations can be found below: