Coefficient Giving Launches $200 Million…

On May 28, 2026

Initiative aims to accelerate development of vaccines by multiple years for a disease that kills more than 600,000 people annually

Fund has raised just over $140 million at launch with backing from multiple major donors

Today, Coefficient Giving announced the launch of the Strep A Vaccine Fund, a multi-donor initiative to accelerate the development of vaccines against Strep A, which kills more than 600,000 people annually. The Fund has raised just over $140 million toward a $200 million goal, with support from Good Ventures, Lucy Southworth, Adam and Abigail Winkel, and other anchor funders.

In wealthy countries, Strep A is known for occasionally causing strep throat, easily treated with antibiotics. But most of the mortality it causes is due to rheumatic heart disease (RHD), which occurs when the body’s immune response to repeated Strep A infection misfires and damages heart valves. Today, roughly 55 million people live with RHD. Without access to monthly penicillin injections or heart valve surgery, both of which are largely unavailable in the low- and middle-income countries where the disease is most common, advanced RHD is often fatal. RHD is overwhelmingly a disease of poverty, of repeated childhood infections due to overcrowded housing and limited sanitation. Children and adolescents, who are most vulnerable to Strep A, face the highest risk of developing the condition.

Strep A’s death toll rivals HIV/AIDS and malaria, but it receives strikingly less funding. “In more than a decade of evaluating causes, we’ve rarely seen a problem this neglected relative to its scale,” said Alexander Berger, CEO of Coefficient Giving. “An effective Strep A vaccine now looks within reach — what’s been missing for more than a century is the funding and coordination to get there. We’re grateful to our partners who are supporting what we think could be one of the highest-impact efforts in global health philanthropy.”

The Fund will support work across the full vaccine development pathway. It aims to:

Accelerate existing vaccine candidates through trials
Seed next-generation candidates based on the most modern vaccine design technology
Back foundational research to improve vaccine development
Prepare the path to deployment to prevent delays
Strengthen the infrastructure to improve community coordination and accelerate development

“For decades, scientists have pushed this field forward on extremely limited funds. Even under these constraints they’ve made important progress, like recently developing a human challenge trial model that opens a path to learning more quickly whether a vaccine works,” said Katharine Collins, senior program officer at Coefficient Giving and leader of the Fund. “What’s held this field back has been attention and resources. Thanks to our partners, we’re now able to apply lessons from other recent vaccine development efforts, like malaria and COVID, to this challenge: test several vaccine candidates in parallel, support a range of approaches rather than betting on one, and prepare for each stage well in advance.”

Coefficient has already made early grants to support two vaccine candidates that showed promise in early-stage testing, improved methods to produce key vaccine components, AI-powered algorithms for detecting RHD based on ultrasound images, and more.

The Fund builds on the model of Coefficient’s other multi-donor initiatives, including the $120 million Abundance & Growth Fund and the $125 million Lead Exposure Action Fund, as it continues to expand its model of collaborative, cost-effective giving to a broader ecosystem of partners and funders.