BLOG: Helping the world prepare for the next global health crisis with the Pandemic Institute

BLOG: Helping the world prepare for the next global health crisis with the Pandemic Institute

Daniel Elliott, CEO of Innova Medical Group, explains why his firm has gifted £10 million to Liverpool to set up the Pandemic Institute…

I had never thought I’d live through a pandemic, let alone lead the team that has delivered billions of COVID tests to the world.

Our company, Innova Medical Group, was founded at the beginning of 2020 with a mission to help tackle some of the world’s most challenging healthcare problems. Little did we know by April 2020, that Covid-19 would became a global pandemic costing millions of lives and shutting down economies across the world. We looked for ways to support our customers manage Covid and by Oct 2020, we were producing 15 million test kits a day and shipping them worldwide.

As a leading provider of screening and diagnostics solutions to our customers globally, we have learned so much from our journey in the last 18 months. The biggest two learnings are: first, it is clear now that pandemics are the biggest threat to the health of the world’s population. Second, the world is not prepared for this or any pandemic and that our responses were fragmented by country, region, states, counties and citie. Now, more than a year on , we are all still looking for a clear plan to move forward, whilst experts are predicting that the next pandemic could be 5 years away .

This is fundamental to why we are gifting £10M ($14M) start-up capital to launch the Pandemic Institute to partners in Liverpool with the University of Liverpool – a global initiative – which has the potential to save lives and improve health outcomes for communities across the globe.

The Pandemic Institute has a mission to help rapidly deliver real-world outcomes and ensure that we’re better prepared for the next global public health threat. It will offer world-leading clinical research and policy regarding widespread outbreaks of infectious diseases in a meaningful way, that is focused on improving the human condition.

Together with private and government sectors, the Pandemic Institute will translate research results into policy and tangible actions, providing a unique holistic approach and comprehensive end-to-end capabilities across the pandemic lifecycle, so we can better prevent the next pandemic and respond more cooperatively and rapidly when it does happen.

The Pandemic Institute in Liverpool will enable and inform pandemic prediction, prevention, preparation, response, and recovery through its three core aims to:

  • Accelerate global response – save time and save lives with timely insights that accelerate the global response to pandemic events
  • Unify global intelligence – provide a unique global view by bringing together and unifying global intelligence in relation to pandemics
  • Increase global societal impact – remove barriers to innovation and improve recovery response to increasing the impact of pandemic research on our global society

Team Liverpool are the pioneers

We have been impressed time and time again by Liverpool for the in-depth research and insights on the pandemic response they’ve completed in the past 12 months. From piloting Operation Moonshot and orchestrating live events, to generating the largest community test report with more than 1 million participants, Liverpool demonstrated to the world its pioneer attitude and deep expertise and knowledge in pandemic research and using that research to enable meaningful actions. They are uniquely prepared to help shape public health policies.

One of the things that stood out for us was the fact that the city, the academic institutions and the residents worked so well together. The pilot programmes could not have achieved their success if one of the parties was missing in action. The synergy and collaborative spirit team Liverpool has, is something that’s hard to copy and a key factor in translating research to public policy, which is critical in managing a pandemic.

When we heard team Liverpool’s plan to establish a Pandemic Institute, we gladly joined in. We have full confidence in team Liverpool’s ability to lead the efforts to build a global pandemic institute and we believe the private sector, government and academic sectors can do meaningful work when they work together.

This is an exciting initiative for Innova Medical Group to be supporting the global community with a unified, end-to-end ambition in mind and we look forward to working collaboratively with existing and future partners in pursuit of a common goal. We look forward to doing our part, working together and helping lead the way to pursue our common goal: preparing the world for the next pandemic.

There is work to be done. And we are honoured to be part of it.

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