After a successful launch, Pandemic PACT is already proving its worth
This cutting-edge programme to track and analyse global research funding and evidence was showcased at a special event on co-organised with the Pandemic Sciences Institute (PSI) at the University of Oxford, who lead the programme. Already the Pandemic PACT Grant Tracker is mapping research data on the current mpox outbreak.
March 20, 2024 marked a milestone in GloPID-R’s scientific achievements with the launch of Pandemic PACT, the Pandemic Preparedness Analytical Capacity and Funding Tracking Programme. The official launch event, co-organised by GloPID-R and the Pandemic Sciences Institute (PSI), took place at the University of Oxford’s Blavatnik School of Government.
Speakers included members of the Pandemic PACT team and many specialists in their fields who have contributed to the success of this pivotal project.
After the team presented key features of the programme, a panel of experts in global preparedness and response discussed how Pandemic PACT improves preparedness for future pandemics and outbreaks.
More than 230 delegates attended the event in person and online, including leading international stakeholders from global funding organisations, researchers, policy makers and representatives of the academic and policy communities.
“The launch was extremely timely in light of the current mpox and H5N1 outbreaks,” said Alice Norton, Principal Investigator for Pandemic PACT and Head of the GloPID-R Research & Policy Team. “
The Pandemic PACT tools serves funders in this context by showing which funders are funding what research, and how. The current context also highlights why it is important for funders to make their data available to improve the completeness of the evidence-based tracking tool to ensure a coordinated response.”
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As of mid-June 2024, the Pandemic PACT dedicated website has data from over $14 billion in research funding across more than 9,800 grants from 73 global funders.
Since the launch, several improvements have been made to the website. These include a new section on Outbreaks with a specific page devoted to the current mpox outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo (2023 – present). An additional page on H5N1 will be added in due course.
In response to signals of new or re-emerging outbreaks that pose significant public health concerns across one or more locations, the team is pivoting to real-time tracking of outbreak research data.
Existing data is being collated in the Pandemic PACT database and will intensify data collection efforts. The resulting outputs are outbreak-specific visualisations mapped to the Pandemic PACT research categories and to specific outbreak research priorities as outlined in any outbreak-specific research agendas and roadmaps.
Building on past achievements
With the capacity to track and analyse global funding and evidence for a wide range of diseases in alignment with the WHO priority diseases, Pandemic PACT builds on and expands the achievements of the UKCDR and GloPID-R’s COVID-19 Research Project Tracker and COVID CIRCLE (the COVID-19 Research Coordination and Learning) with a focus on resource-limited settings. These initiatives and the associated Living Mapping Review for COVID-19 funded research projects (LMR) showed the importance of sharing and analysing data on research at the point of funding to improve coordination during a pandemic.
Publication in The Lancet
To coincide with the Pandemic PACT launch, a Correspondence signed by the team was published in The Lancet on 19 March, ‘Improving coherence of global research funding: Pandemic PACT’.
Funders
The following funding organisations have helped make the Pandemic PACT programme possible.
Pandemic PACT is a GloPID-R initiative, led from PSI and in partnership with UKCDR, to track and analyse global data for research on diseases with pandemic potential and broader preparedness activities, ready to pivot in response to outbreaks.
