Author: Alex Hoekstra

The Balvi grant will enable continued development, testing, and continuous updates and improvements of open-source vaccine designs and production methods, including “vaccine factory in a tube” technology. Funds will also support build-out of a decentralized scientific network for open sharing of production methods and technologies, as well as clinical trial and immunology data.

The Rapid Deployment Vaccine Collaborative (RaDVaC) is pleased to announce a $2.5M grant from Balvi, the philanthropic organization established by Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, which funds high-risk, high-reward projects to improve global pandemic preparedness and response capabilities.

The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic continues to reveal very serious, ongoing deficiencies in global pandemic readiness and public health responses. Once lifesaving vaccines were deployed, they showed very high levels of effectiveness. However, despite having been designed and produced in the earliest days of the pandemic, due to complex, slow, and inefficient regulatory burdens, they remained inaccessible for nearly a year in high-income countries, and for far longer in low- and middle-income countries. In response to this urgent humanitarian need caused by the vaccine access gap, RaDVaC developed and published free and open-source vaccine recipes and protocols, and offered scientific support to individuals and groups worldwide producing and testing the vaccines.

Since early 2020, RaDVaC has been creating technically accessible open-source vaccine designs and development tools, and constantly refining them in light of ongoing research. RaDVaC will use funds from Balvi to expand these activities and to create distributable vaccine resources, including “vaccine factory in a tube” technology. 

RaDVaC and Balvi share a commitment to bridging and shortening the vaccine access gap, and in establishing both the citizen-science right to vaccine creation, and vaccine access as a public good. More broadly, both organizations share the goal of fostering decentralized, open-source research and knowledge dissemination. 

With this grant, RaDVaC will be able to expand its efforts to enhance global pandemic preparedness on a number of fronts.

The fragility of our global infrastructure has never been more clear. Decades of neglect have rendered public health catastrophically under-equipped to deal with emerging infectious diseases like COVID-19. Despite the scientific progress in scientific tools that enable biomedical development in remarkable time — measurable in hours and days, rather than in months and years — rigid and hyper-centralized research, rigid regulatory frameworks, and limited production methods frameworks are unable to translate practical vaccine science into real-world action in time to curb outbreaks from disruptingderailing global health, and the global economy. The costs of these failures with regard to COVID-19 are vast and still mushroominggrowing, while the riskpace of new viral threats spillover events is only increasing with urbanization, industrialization, and habitat changes around the world. 

We are met now with an inescapable choice: Do we accept and tolerateadjust to a future of more pandemics, or do we act to strengthen our abilitiesy to predict, prevent, and defend ourselves against them?

The Rapid Deployment Vaccine Collaborative (RaDVaC) is a 501(c)(3) organization devoted to the latter: taking decisive action to protect humanity against the current and emerging pandemics health., and creating a foundation of unprecedented scientific access and on which all of humanity can rise to the health challenges of the next century and beyond. In short, our goal is to maximize vaccine access to vaccines by maximizing global access to 1) the underlying science and tools of vaccinology, 2) specific research findings formulas for vaccine production, 3) in times and places of need,  before outbreaks become pandemics.

Founded by a team of scientists affiliated with Harvard and MIT, RaDVaC is building a platform of modular, highly transparent, radically accessible vaccines that can be both rapidly designed and rapidly deployed anywhere with a high confidence of safety and success. The team has drawn from decades of modern vaccinology, as well as a legacy of open-source design principles that have ensured continuous innovation and security across both computer- and bio-science. In fact, a powerful precedent for understanding the impacts that RaDVaC’s approach to vaccinology can achieve can be found in Linux’s history as a decentralized, collaborative software-building resource.

Most people are unaware of Linux’s proliferation from a single programmer’s project in the early 1990’s, to the backbone of modern digital and cybersecurity infrastructure. Open-source Linux-based code underlies 23 of the top 25 websites online, 80% of mobile device operating systems, and more than 90% of cloud computing around the globe today. The transparency, accessibility, and overall decentralization of high-quality tools provided by Linux have evolved into thousands of digital applications (many of which, like Google’s Android operating system, are key products of the world’s most profitable companies).

RaDVaC is building the open-source operating system of vaccines. In a world of viruses which evolve constantly, so too must our defenses against them. That is why RaDVaC is building and sharing tools for modular vaccines that can be adapted quickly, with high confidence of success, produced using scalable infrastructure that leverages the power of collaborative, open-source development that hasn’t yet been activated in vaccinology and global health security. Like Linux, we are constructing resources for others to build with, innovate with, and outsmart pathogens with — both individually and as a global network. 

RaDVaC is seeking to raise $3M in the next 12 months to expand this effort. Funds will be used to grow our team, evaluate and test new vaccine formulations, extend the data sharing platform, and to help seed new businesses for eventual clinical trialing and enterprise-scale production of vaccines based on the RaDVaC platform. We are in the early days of this new model of global bio-defense, but if we invest wisely in the highly leverageable infrastructure that RaDVaC is building, we can empower the whole of humanity forward into a healthier, more prepared, and more sustainable future.