The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation said today (January 29) that they will donate $10 billion over the next 10 years to develop vaccines and deliver them to the world's poorest countries. The donation, announced at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland, is the foundation's largest contribution to vaccine research and distribution, more than doubling the $4.5 billion sum it has given over the last five years.

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With the money, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates hopes to raise immunization rates for diarrhea and pneumonia to 90%, which could save some 7.6 million children under the age of five by 2019, according to a model developed at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, Maryland, Nature News reported. Furthermore, if the malaria vaccine being developed by GSK -- currently in its final testing phase -- is introduced by 2014, it could save an additional 1.1 million lives, the Gates Foundation estimates.

"We must make this the decade of vaccines," Gates said in a statement. "Vaccines already save and improve millions of lives in developing countries. Innovation will make it possible to save more children than ever before." (Check out our recent feature on the vaccine development industry, which thanks in part to recent investment in the developing world, is now thriving.)

Last year, the Gates Foundation and a number of governments and NGOs donated $1.5 billion towards a vaccine for pneumococcal diseases, such as meningitis and pneumonia, in an advance market commitment -- an approach to encourage a high-volume, low-cost supply of the vaccine to meet the needs of poor countries. Basically, it's a promise to help buy a vaccine that meets certain criteria, The Wall Street Journal reported. For manufacturers to profit from the vaccine, they must commit to sell it for just $7 per dose -- 10 times less than the going price for the vaccine in the developed world.

"We expect that manufacturers will commit to building factories much earlier than they would otherwise in order to compete for this money," Gates wrote in his annual letter, published earlier this week. "During 2010 the negotiations with manufacturers should come to a conclusion. We believe this will make a big difference in how quickly this vaccine gets to poor children and show how this approach can be applied to other medicines."