Health for All in Focus: “Responding to Ebola and Zika"

A spotlight from GSK's 2015 Responsible Business Supplement:

2014 saw a critical public health emergency with the outbreak of Ebola in West Africa, which demanded an urgent response and the impact continued in 2015. As well as providing humanitarian support to affected regions, GSK accelerated the development of our candidate vaccine for Ebola at an unprecedented rate, with trials now underway.

Collaboration has been critical – we have been able to fast track development of the Ebola vaccine due to the fact that many different organisations, including the National Institutes of Health in the USA, the WHO, the Wellcome Trust and the UK Government, have worked together with a common goal.

We have been closely monitoring the outbreak of the Zika virus in Brazil since it began in the Autumn of 2015. We have reached out to our partners and collaborators in Brazil and across the world to assess the situation and feasibility of potential vaccine development. We are also evaluating our existing technology platforms, which we believe could potentially be suitable for working on a Zika virus vaccine.

While our experience, particularly with developing the Ebola vaccine, will be useful in the event of future outbreaks, we recognize that the global community must improve its capacity to prevent or quickly control unpredictable disease outbreaks. This will help avoid devastating consequences for human health, economies and global security.

GSK is committed to working with partners to help ensure a more proactive approach to planning for global health threats so that we can respond faster in the event of similar crises. For example we have worked with the US Government’s Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), since its inception.
 

More information on this topic visit GSK's website, 2015 Annual Report, and 2015 Responsible Business Supplement.