RIGHT Foundation’s Product Development Award

The RIGHT Foundation is a Korean non-profit organization supported by the Korean Ministry of Health and Welfare, Korean life science companies, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. RIGHT Foundation aims to alleviate the burden of infectious diseases that disproportionately affect the people in low and middle-income countries.

This year’s PDA General Call expands the funding scope to include NCDs that can increase the likelihood of infection or exacerbate the clinical outcomes of infectious diseases in lowresource settings. For diagnostics, this RfP seeks to support efforts to develop true- or near POC molecular diagnostic platforms for diseases for which effective and affordable diagnostics are limited.

Objective

• This RfP seeks to support a broad range of efforts to develop and make available vaccines, therapeutics/biologics and diagnostics that can significantly improve effectiveness, safety, or access across regions.

Funding Scope

• Vaccines
  • Vaccine concepts with new antigens or antigenic epitopes to improve efficacy, breadth or duration of protection against multiple related species, strains, serotypes, groups or variants
  • Clinical development of novel immunogens designed with the structure-guided approach or reverse vaccinology 2.0
  • New formulations or adjuvants to extend the duration of immunity (i.e., long-lasting immune memory)
  • Platform technologies that can reduce complexity and cost of manufacturing to support local production in LMICs
  • Innovative delivery platforms to close immunization gaps in marginalized communities
  • Optimization of existing vaccines to improve the route of administration, and/or reduce the number of doses
• Therapeutics/Biologics
  • New small molecules or biologics that target the molecular sites from new understanding of the pathogen, host-pathogen interactions, mechanisms of infection or mechanism of severe disease
  • New or improved approaches to reduce doses and treatment duration
  • New combination of previously characterized compounds to improve potency, safety and expand the target population to include high-risk groups (e.g., pregnant women)
  • Optimizing production method to reduce complexity and costs to support local production in LMICs
• Diagnostics
  • True or near point-of-care (POC) molecular diagnostic platforms that can offer:
    • High sensitivity and specificity
    • Detection near patient
    • Fast turnaround time
    • Routine multi-disease tests across >80% of primary healthcare facilities
    • Low-cost and easy-to-use platforms
    • Simple device-based and instrument- free technologies
  • New platforms to simultaneously detect multiple pathogens using minimal specimen volume
  • Innovative platforms to detect multidrug resistance (e.g., antimicrobial resistance) and analyze results to guide treatment and patient management in support of appropriate use of antibiotics
  • Improvements in existing diagnostics to reduce complexity for end users across diverse resource settings (e.g., rural, community settings), to reduce cost and assay time

Funding Information

• Award amount & duration
  • Up to 4 billion Korean won per project for up to 36 months
  • Co-funding required for at least 50% of the project cost from for-profit entities. Not applicable if the project team consists of only academic institutions and/or non-profit organizations.
• Target health conditions
  • Infectious diseases with a disproportionate burden in LMICs or infectious diseases with a pandemic potential.
  • Neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) especially Visceral Leishmaniasis
  • Non-communicable diseases (NCDs) that can be caused by or exacerbated by infectious diseases or can exacerbate the clinical outcomes of infectious diseases in LMICs (e.g., cervical cancer, hypertension, diabetes)
  • Sexually transmitted infections (e.g., chlamydia and gonorrhoea, HepB, syphilis, HIV)
  • Antibiotic resistant bacteria
  • Malaria, tuberculosis, dengue, cholera
  • Hypertension, diabetes
• Development stage
  • From or near the initiation of the clinical development or validation phase to regulatory approval and WHO prequalification (WHO PQ)

Ineligible Funding

• Discovery-phase proposals to identify pre-clinical candidates
• Basic research studies to improve understanding of pathogens, infections or disease
• Proposals without any data to support the proof of principle
• Proposals for setting up research facilities or capital equipment.
• Duplicate technologies without a substantive advantage over the current best practice
• Concepts without a clear hypothesis or rationale for improved efficacy, potency, safety and/or ease of use over the current tools in clinical use or tools currently in development
• Proposals with a target use-case that fails to reflect the gaps, needs and the end-users’ perspectives in LMICs
• Development of products with characteristics that will pose a barrier to equitable access to the populations in LMICs

Eligibility Criteria

• Partnership requirement
  • The applicant team must include at least one Korean entity with R&D expertise to make a significant contribution to the project. Inclusion of researchers, developers or advisors from the LMICs as the Principal Investigator or a collaborator is highly preferred.
  • Eligible entities for Korean or international partners
    • For-profit companies engaged in life science or healthcare
    • Non-profit research organizations and foundations
    • Government research institutions
    • Academic institutions
    • Public health laboratories
• Commitment to Global Access
  • As a funding condition, they require all the grantees and their collaborators to agree to the Global Access Policy, and to articulate a clear path to achieving global access. The Global Access Policy represents the core principle of the RIGHT Foundation to achieve the mission of improving health and health equity. “Global Access” means (i) all information and knowledge gained from grants, projects or other investments funded by the RIGHT Foundation should be promptly and broadly disseminated; and (ii) products, data and other innovations resulting from the funded work should be made accessible to LMICs in terms of price, quantity, quality, and timeframe to ensure equitable access by those in need regardless of their resource constraints.

For more information, visit RIGHT Foundation.