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From the One Health (OH) perspective, the achievement of better public health results depends on effective strategies and interventions based on integrated research in diverse sectors of activity (human health, animal health, agriculture, and environment). The central topic in the United Nations 2030 Agenda aims at a world free of hunger, poverty, and severe disease through the achievement of 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The objective of the present study is to evaluate countries and applicants of technologies patented between 2015-2020. From this methodological perspective, searches have been carried out in this study on the global patent database documents available, using specific search strategies for technologies related to challenging diseases for achieving SDGs, such as neglected communicable and non-communicable diseases: diarrhea, tuberculosis, malaria, obesity, cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, lung cancer, human schistosomiasis, and Zika.

In this article, we present breakthroughs and challenges in vaccine development for COVID-19 pandemic, discussing issues related to pandemic preparedness and their implications for circular bioeconomy and sustainability. Notwithstanding the unprecedented accelerated speed of COVID-19 vaccine development, just 9 months after the emergence of the pandemic in Wuhan, China, benefiting from previous developments in SARS and MERS vaccines, significant gaps persist in global vaccine preparedness. These gaps include issues related to immunity and protection, particularly to the limited vaccine protection against recent emergence of concerning new viral variants in the UK, South Africa, and Brazil and the consequent need for vaccine redesign. We examine these gaps and discuss the main issues that could impact on global vaccine availability in the current pandemic scenario: (1) breakthroughs and constraints in development and production of leading global COVID-19 vaccines; (2) innovation and technological development advances and gaps, providing information on global patent assignees for COVID-19, SARS, and MERS vaccine patents; (3) local capacity for development and production of COVID-19, SARS, and MERS vaccines in three emerging agro-based countries (India, Brazil, and South Africa); and (4) future scenarios, examining how these issues and vaccines redesign for new SARS-CoV-2 variants could impact on global access to vaccines and implications for circular bioeconomy and sustainability in the post-COVID era.

This chapter provides an analysis of global trends in genomic vaccines, a radical innovation breakthrough (RIB), from technological foresight and pandemic preparedness perspectives, crucial in times of COVID-19. From this conceptual framework, the state-of-the-art and technological prospects for these genomic vaccines are examined, based on a search on scientific publications and on patents for the period 2010–2020, presenting the vaccine patent landscape for the period. This search provides an overview of recent breakthroughs in genomic vaccines and two other related RIBs, gene editing and gene therapy, and identifies novel strategies that could positively contribute to the development of future genomic vaccines to pandemic diseases and COVID-19. Our results evidence in the last decade extraordinary advances in genetic approaches, gene editing and gene therapy, and the rapid development of innovative DNA/RNA vaccines for the prevention and immunotherapy of an extensive diversity of diseases, from the neglected infectious ones to cancer therapy. These results highlight the flexibility of vaccine technological platforms, crucial for response to pandemics and COVID-19, including hepatitis B, varicella, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, autoimmune diseases – systemic lupus erythematosus, lupus nephritis, and autoimmune myasthenia gravis – and finally a new nucleic acid sequence for immunogenicity to SARS-CoV-2.

This chapter provides an overview, from bioeconomic and global sustainability perspectives, of the main constraints to the current global vaccine innovation system for achieving Sustainable Development Goals – SDGs. Biotechnology market trends, gaps in vaccine coverage against emerging and neglected diseases, and patent protection and regulation are discussed. A structured long-term “public-return-driven” innovation model to overcome vaccine market failure is proposed.