Operation Warp Speed 2.0 Conference

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Last week, 1Day Sooner convened more than 80 of the nation’s top health, biosecurity, and research leaders for our third annual Operation Warp Speed 2.0 conference. This year’s theme, “Applying Pull Funding & Regulatory Capacity to Advance New Biotechnologies & Prevent Pandemics,” aimed to share proposals and activate change in replicating the elements that made Operation Warp Speed (OWS) successful and build support for vaccine development and pandemic preparedness. Read on for the top takeaways from the event.

Two interactive workshops kicked off the day, where attendees discussed current and future efforts to help solve two of our most pressing health risks. The first workshop focused on “The Hepatitis C Vaccine Development Pathway,” featuring presentations from NIH Distinguished Investigator, Liver Diseases Jake Liang; Centivax Chief Medical Officer Jerry Sadoff; PopVax Founder Soham Sankaran; and University of New Mexico Infectious Disease Epidemiologist Kimberly Page. The second workshop targeted “Opportunities, Obstacles, and Next Steps for the Pandemic All-Hazards Preparedness Act” and was moderated by Texas A&M, Associate Dean, Global One Health Gerry Parker.

**A National Initiative to Eliminate Hepatitis C in the U.S.**

![](https://www.1daysooner.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/Presentations-142-2048x1365.jpg)Francis Collins gives a speech on “A National Initiative to Eliminate Hepatitis C in the U.S.”

Francis Collins, NIH Distinguished Investigator, Center for Precision Health Research, gave the keynote on the urgent need to develop a Hepatitis C vaccine. Hepatitis C affects 4 million people in the U.S., with 40% unaware of their infections.

He noted that the discovery of a cure in 2014 was one of the most important biomedical breakthroughs of the past 30 years. However, he stressed that there is a need to continue the quest for a vaccine and further education on elimination efforts, especially as treatment is still not part of routine care. In fact, despite a cure existing for the past decade, many primary care physicians are unaware of its existence, and education is needed to inform them that it will not cause undue burden on those suffering from the disease. Only one in three patients who have the disease get cured. That number diminishes even further for those without health insurance.

Hepatitis C is a cause with bipartisan support, as the diagnosis and treatment of the disease are costly. For example, doubling the number of Medicaid recipients cured will save the federal government $7 billion. That doesn’t even take into account the upcoming Congressional Budget Office report predicting cost savings based on significant reductions in liver fibrosis, cirrhosis, liver cancer, diabetes, kidney diseases, and liver transplants.

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