The Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations has agreed to provide up to $16.5 million to Minapharm Group, an Egyptian biopharmaceutical company, to push an experimental vaccine against Bundibugyo ebolavirus through preclinical development and into a Phase 1 clinical trial in Africa. The announcement, made jointly from Oslo, Cairo, and Berlin on August 27, comes as the Democratic Republic of Congo battles what CEPI has described as the fastest growing and second largest Ebola outbreak on record, a crisis that has made the search for an effective Bundibugyo specific vaccine considerably more urgent than it was even a year ago.
Minapharm’s candidate is the fifth Bundibugyo specific vaccine CEPI has funded in response to the outbreak, part of a deliberate strategy of backing multiple candidates in parallel rather than betting everything on a single approach. The organisation says it wants at least two of those candidates to eventually reach emergency authorisation and World Health Organization approval, treating this less like a single race and more like a portfolio built to survive the failure of any one bet along the way.
The science behind Minapharm’s candidate traces back to its Berlin based subsidiary, ProBioGen, which designed the vaccine using its proprietary MVA-CR19 platform. The underlying technology relies on a modified vaccinia Ankara virus, a version of the vaccine strain deliberately weakened so it cannot replicate inside human cells, while still training the immune system to recognise and respond to a target pathogen. The same platform already underpins licensed vaccines against smallpox and mpox, and a related version built on the same technology has shown long lasting immunity against Zaire ebolavirus, the more widely known and more commonly studied Ebola species. What sets Minapharm’s Bundibugyo candidate apart within CEPI’s current portfolio is that it is specifically designed to trigger both antibody and T cell immune responses at once, a dual approach CEPI believes could offer broader and more durable protection than vaccines relying on just one arm of the immune system.
There is a manufacturing story running alongside the scientific one that is worth paying attention to on its own. In the initial phase, ProBioGen will produce the vaccine’s active ingredient, known as the drug substance, in Germany, before shipping it to Minapharm’s facility in Cairo, where it will be combined with other ingredients and packaged into the finished product ready for testing. That split arrangement is meant to be temporary. Minapharm and ProBioGen have said they plan to eventually transfer the entire drug substance manufacturing process to Minapharm’s biotechnology facilities in Egypt as well, moving toward fully local production of both the active ingredient and the finished vaccine. If that transition happens on schedule, it would mark a genuine expansion of Egypt’s pharmaceutical manufacturing capability, not just participation in someone else’s supply chain.
CEPI CEO Richard Hatchett framed the funding as a vote of confidence in African led innovation at a moment when the continent badly needs faster answers to a fast moving outbreak, while also stressing that accelerating vaccine development now is as much about future preparedness as it is about the current crisis in the DRC. That framing is worth taking seriously rather than treating as boilerplate. Minapharm is a genuinely African headquartered company driving this initiative, even though the specific scientific design work sits with its German subsidiary for now, and the stated plan to bring full manufacturing home to Cairo is exactly the kind of capacity building that turns a single grant into lasting local infrastructure rather than a one time injection of foreign funded research.
If the Phase 1 trial goes well, demonstrating that the vaccine is both safe and capable of triggering a meaningful immune response, CEPI has said it expects to fund larger studies aimed at proving the vaccine actually works and pursuing emergency authorisation from there, with the explicit goal of getting a working vaccine to affected countries quickly and affordably rather than only after a lengthy standard approval timeline. For a region that has spent decades relying on vaccines designed, tested, and manufactured almost entirely outside Africa, a homegrown biopharmaceutical company leading one of only five funded approaches to an active, worsening outbreak is a meaningful shift in where that kind of capability is starting to live.
