$1.4B for New COVID Tools, $24M for mRNA Cancer-Fighting Tech in HHS Awards

HHS announced a slate of new funding initiatives this week, including $1.4 billion for Project NextGen to support development of novel COVID-19 technologies and $24 million for Curing the Uncurable via RNA-Encoded Immunogene Tuning (CUREIT), part of the Biden administration’s Cancer Moonshot program.

Project NextGen, a $5 billion initiative from the Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response’s (ASPR) Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) conducted in collaboration with the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), works to get promising COVID-19 vaccines and therapeutics into clinical trials and ready for FDA regulatory review.

Among the project’s new $1.4 billion funding the majority — $1 billion — will go toward vaccine phase 2b clinical trials, to be disbursed to ICON Government and Public Health Solutions, based in Hinckley, Ohio; Pharm-Olam, based in Houston, Texas; Technical Resources Intl., based in Bethesda, Md.; and Rho Federal Systems, in Durham, N.C. Additional funds were awarded to Regeneron, Global Health Investment Corp. and Johnson & Johnson Innovation.

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