Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation doubles down on health partnership with South Korea — report - Endpoints News

As drug­mak­ers race to bring Omi­cron-spe­cif­ic vac­cines to mar­ket, the Bill & Melin­da Gates Foun­da­tion is al­ready fo­cused on the next pan­dem­ic. And on Tues­day, the Mi­crosoft founder re­port­ed­ly agreed to dou­ble down on the foun­da­tion's part­ner­ship with South Ko­rea.

The Bill & Melin­da Gates Foun­da­tion and South Ko­rea have pledged to col­lab­o­rate on projects such as a glob­al health re­search fund, and work with oth­er health or­ga­ni­za­tions like CEPI to ad­dress dis­par­i­ties and ad­vance pro­grams in in­fec­tious dis­eases, Reuters and the As­so­ci­at­ed Press re­port­ed.

"I am con­fi­dent that with these steps we can con­tin­ue to rad­i­cal­ly im­prove glob­al health, to cut the num­ber of chil­dren dy­ing in half again, to erad­i­cate dis­eases like po­lio, measles and malar­ia, and im­prove the lives of all hu­mans," Gates said in a speech to South Ko­re­an law­mak­ers, per the AP.

SK Group, South Ko­rea's sec­ond largest con­glom­er­ate, al­so an­nounced on Tues­day that it's co-lead­ing a $750 mil­lion fund­ing round with Gates for Ter­raPow­er, a US-based de­vel­op­er of nu­clear re­ac­tors. While car­bon-free pow­er is one of Ter­raPow­er's main fo­cus­es, the com­pa­ny al­so has the abil­i­ty to pro­duce the med­ical ra­dioiso­tope Ac­tini­um-225 (Ac-225), which is used as a raw ma­te­r­i­al in some can­cer ther­a­pies.

"Whether it's ad­dress­ing cli­mate change with car­bon-free ad­vanced nu­clear en­er­gy, or fight­ing can­cer with nu­clear iso­topes, our team is de­ploy­ing tech­nol­o­gy so­lu­tions and in­vestors across the world are tak­ing note," Ter­raPow­er CEO Chris Levesque said in a state­ment.

The Gates foun­da­tion has struck a se­ries of re­cent deals aim­ing to curb in­fec­tious dis­eases, in­clud­ing a $90 mil­lion fund­ing round with the No­vo Nordisk Foun­da­tion and Open Phil­an­thropy back in March to sup­port a new ini­tia­tive called Pan­dem­ic An­tivi­ral Dis­cov­ery (PAD). The foun­da­tion al­so ex­pand­ed its part­ner­ship with Vir Biotech­nol­o­gy back in Jan­u­ary for its T-cell vac­cine pro­gram.