1Day Sooner advocates on behalf of people who join medical studies for altruistic reasons. We focus particularly on “challenge studies,” where participants are exposed to pathogens to develop vaccines and learn about infectious disease. We work at three levels: trials, technologies, and policies. Our best analysis of our knowable causal impact through summer of 2024 can be found here. We believe we have a strong opportunity to generate millions of dollars in funding for hepatitis C vaccine development for $50-200K.

This year, we expanded our trials work by launching our “Cooperative Participant Organization,” which provides support to trial teams working on high-value infectious disease research. This has expanded our trial support work from our previous focus on hepatitis C challenge studies to cover enteric, parasitic, and other hepatic trials.

But expanding our trials work has opened up a gap in advancing hepatitis C vaccine technologies, since the team that previously covered both trials and hepatitis C vaccines now have a wider range of responsibilities. We have an opportunity that we think could lead to >$10M in funding from the NIH for hepatitis C vaccine development (including hepatitis C challenge studies), but we currently do not have the staffing to adequately pursue it. To make this project sustainable, we need at least $50K to hire a contractor and ideally $200K to hire a staffer to work full-time on advancing the hepatitis C vaccine field.

The opportunity is to move NIH funding currently devoted to supporting HIV vaccines to support hepatitis C vaccines (including support for challenge studies). Besides COVID, HIV vaccines have received the most funding of any disease, but they have proven extremely difficult to develop. The recent approval of the highly effective prophylactic lenacapavir significantly reduces the counterfactual value of an HIV vaccine. At the same time, the coinfection of much of the HIV patient population with hepatitis C creates an opening to redirect some funds to the far less well-funded area of hepatitis C vaccine development.

To advance this goal, last year the NIH had planned to conduct a workshop on hepatitis C challenge studies, to be attended by key HIV stakeholders. Due to the change in administration and reductions in force of NIH staff, this workshop did not occur. After our discussions with the NIH team who had planned that workshop, we think hosting it in 2026 would accomplish its original purpose, but NIH staff are not in a position to host the workshop themselves (even though they would be able to attend and make grants based on the discussion there).

Thus we need resources to host the workshop and conduct follow-on activities to ensure funding for HCV vaccine development. While impossible to know how much funding from the NIH would be provided to the early stage vaccine and challenge studies the workshop would cover, it would likely represent more than 50% of the current funding for the hepatitis C vaccine field.      

The hepatitis C disease burden is on the order of 10 million DALYs per year. We think a ten percent reduction of that burden for ten years is a reasonable goal for a vaccine to target and that an approved hepatitis C vaccine is currently something like 5-20 years away. (As a baseline, the average drug takes ten years from the start of in-human studies to regulatory approval and no hepatitis C vaccines are currently being studied in humans, though one candidate will likely begin studies soon). You can learn more about hepatitis C challenge studies and hepatitis C vaccines here.

We appreciate the EA community’s support for our work.