Infectious Disease R&D Tracker

The Infectious Disease R&D Tracker includes drugs, vaccines, biologics, diagnostics, and vector control products for neglected and emerging infectious diseases.

The neglected disease scope mirrors the G-FINDER scope for neglected diseases, including diseases and health issues if they meet all three of the following criteria:

1. The disease or health issue disproportionately affects populations in low- and middle-income countries;
2. There is a need for new products (i.e. there is no existing product, or improved or additional products are needed); and
3. There is market failure (i.e. there is insufficient commercial market to attract R&D investment by private industry).

The emerging infectious disease scope is based upon the priority diseases identified in the World Health Organization’s R&D Blueprint for Action to Prevent Epidemics and some of the priority diseases identified by CEPI.

The tracker includes products approved since 1999, as well as active pipeline candidates. Not all product types are included for all areas: product/neglected disease pathogen combinations for which there is a viable commercial market are excluded. Diagnostics for emerging infectious diseases have been grouped under technology categories. In the 2025 update, we've disaggregated neglected disease diagnostics into individual tests, which accounts for an increase in diagnostics compared to 2023 (145 additional products, 58 additional candidates).

Approved products were defined as finished pharmaceutical products, drugs, vaccines, biologics, vector control products or diagnostics that had been granted a marketing authorisation by a medicines regulatory authority or had obtained WHO prequalification. A preliminary list of approved products was identified through a normative literature review of treatment guidelines, WHO position papers, and essential medicines and diagnostic list databases. This preliminary list was then cross-referenced against regulatory authority databases.

Candidates were defined as potential drugs, vaccines, vector control products, diagnostics, or platform technologies, currently under investigation that had yet to be approved by a medicines regulatory authority.

The 2025 update builds on previous pipeline reviews. A comprehensive review was conducted by Impact Global Health (formerly Policy Cures Research) in 2023, funded by the Gates Foundation. Pipeline reviews conducted by Impact Global Health in 2017 and 2019 were commissioned and funded by WHO-TDR and Duke University. These also build on the 2015 neglected diseases product pipeline review, and pipeline data collected for the 2012 Policy Cures/ Global Health Technologies (GHTC) report ‘Saving lives and creating impact: Why investing in global health R&D works’, which in turn was based on BIO Ventures for Global Health (BVGH) Global Health Primer, with additional research and analysis by Policy Cures Research.

Updates conducted in 2023 and 2025 utilised several sources of data, including publicly available product and clinical trial databases, academic literature, conference abstracts and presentations, and developer websites.

R&D priorities were defined as active “widely accepted” target product profiles or product profile characteristics which had undergo extensive public consultation with diverse relevant stakeholders before publication. We included those published by the WHO and malaria drug priorities set out by Medicines for Malaria Venture – stating the intended use, target populations and other desired attributes of products, to guide product R&D for a particular disease. R&D priorities were identified from WHO’s database of target product profiles (TPPs) and product profile characteristics (PPCs) and from Medicines for Malaria Venture’s pipeline. For each disease and product area that had defined TPPs or PPCs, active pipeline candidates were evaluated on whether they met the defined characteristics on indication, intended use, efficacy, safety and target population.

Since 1999, 1314 products that are aligned with the G-FINDER scope for neglected diseases and emerging infectious diseases have been approved. This represents 979 products for neglected diseases and 335 for emerging infectious diseases, including biologics, diagnostics, drugs, vaccines, microbicides and vector control products (VCPs).

Neglected disease products

The vast majority of the neglected disease products are dengue innovations (276 products, 28%). Within that, diagnostics are the most common at 274 products, representing almost all of the dengue product landscape (99%).

Diagnostics were the most prevalent product type, making up the majority (812 products) of the neglected disease landscape and spread across all diseases in scope except for hookworm and scabies. 

Emerging infectious disease products

The 335 emerging infectious disease products identified represent the landscape of finished pharmaceutical products relevant to the WHO R&D Blueprint priority pathogens (with the exception of COVID-19 diagnostics which were excluded.) Like the neglected disease landscape, the most common product type is diagnostics representing 82% of the landscape (275 approved products), followed by vaccines (44, 13%), biologics (9, 3%) and drugs (7, 2%). Only two diseases have approved products for biologics - COVID-19 and Ebola (targeting Zaire ebolavirus only) and four diseases with approved vaccines - COVID-19, Zaire ebolavirus, mpox and Chikungunya.

_{Note: where there are a number of “me too” diagnostics for emerging infectious diseases, these were captured by technology type to avoid duplication and artificial inflation of the landscape. Individual test names are captured as “alternative names” but the list is not an exhaustive.}

As of February 2025, a total of 1,418 active candidates have been identified in the neglected and emerging infectious diseases pipeline.

Neglected disease candidates

The neglected disease pipeline boasts 799 active candidates, marking a 6% growth since 2023. A like-for-like comparison with 2023 shows the 2025 pipeline shrank slightly, by 2%, after accounting for an artefactual increase in diagnostics, caused by a change in how we count them. Majority of the neglected disease pipeline (408 candidates) is made up of candidates for three major diseases: malaria (21%), TB and HIV (15% each).

• Malaria has 56 vaccine and 63 drug candidates
• Tuberculosis has 29 vaccine and 47 drug candidates
• HIV/AIDS has 51 vaccine, 21 drug and 29 biologics candidates

Promisingly, a significant proportion of the neglected disease pipeline is in clinical development (59%).

One notable shift in the neglected disease pipeline is in biologics. Six years ago, only a handful of biologics were in development, and there are now 64 in the pipeline, representing 8% of the total neglected disease pipeline and nearly 21% of the therapeutics pipeline. Over half of all biologics are monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) which are being developed for HIV/AIDS, malaria, dengue, hepatitis B and diarrhoeal diseases. There are also several therapeutic vaccines for tuberculosis. This growth underscores the significant advancements being made in this domain.

Despite significant growth in some areas, for more than a third of the diseases in the neglected diseases scope (8 out of 22), there are fewer than 10 candidates in the pipeline combined across all product areas.

_{For the 2025 update, we disaggregated diagnostic tests that were previously grouped by similar technologies (resulting in 15 additional candidates), leveraged FIND’s DxConnect test directory after its launch in 2022 (40 additional candidates) and added yaws to our scope (3 additional candidates).}

Emerging infectious disease candidates

The pipeline for emerging infectious diseases includes 619 candidates.

Vaccine candidates for COVID-19 represent 28% of the total candidates in the pipeline (208 candidates). 37% of these COVID-19 vaccines are in Phase III trials (64 candidates), 34% are in Phase I (58) and 29% are in Phase II (51).

For the remainder 444 candidates, vaccines represent 36% of the pipeline with 158 candidates, followed by 115 drug candidates (26%), 92 diagnostics candidates (21%), and 79 biologics (18%). Following COVID-19, candidates for filoviruses (Ebola and Marburg) make up the next largest proportion of the pipeline (88 products, 20%). This is followed by Bunyaviral disease (Crimean-Congo Haemorrhagic Fever and Rift Valley Fever) (59 candidates, 13%), Chikungunya (51 candidates, 13%) and Lassa fever (46 candidates, 10%). The remainder is made up of Nipah (40, 9%), MERS (39, 9%), mpox (32, 7%) and Zika (30, 7%).

Regarding development phases, 61% of vaccine and therapeutics candidates for emerging infectious diseases (excluding COVID-19) are in preclinical development (214). 20% are in Phase I (71 candidates), the majority of which are vaccines. Only 13% of candidates (44) are in Phase II, and just 7% (23) have progressed to Phase III trials. These late-stage candidates include vaccines and biologics for Chikungunya and Ebola, and one therapeutic for mpox.