Promoting versatile vaccine development for emerging pandemics | npj Vaccines

"In this case, the generated knowledge is a clear example of a positive spillover that creates a need for public intervention into the market for research and development. However, this relies on the results of translatable work on prototype pathogens—such as insights into antigen optimisation—being accessible to public use. Therefore, public funding of prototype pathogen work should seek to promote research that generates openly accessible and translatable insights as far as practicable, while also judiciously taking advantage of generating proprietary intellectual property. Even in the cases where a proprietary insight might primarily benefit the originating organisation, such as early preclinical evidence and safety data from clinical trials, the research remains worthy of subsidy because society benefits from having developers that are better prepared to respond to emerging infectious diseases...."