PDVAC Executive summary 2019: 6th annual meeting

Overview

The Decade of Vaccines, and its accompanying Global Vaccine Action Plan (GVAP) are coming to an end in 2020, 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 discussions will be captured in a separate report, but the 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 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.