Our Pipeline Portal: from data to decisions

Global health decision-makers are being asked to do more with less. Funding is contracting, the number of competing priorities is growing, and the evidence base for setting them remains fragmented. Instinct and legacy allocations are poor substitutes for data — yet the data that exists is scattered across sources, recorded in inconsistent formats, and difficult to compare across diseases, product types or time.

What is missing is not more information but a single, reliable place to view the landscape whole. Basic comparisons across disease areas still require heavy groundwork. Trends over time are harder still.

And the question that matters most — is a given pipeline actually making progress? — is one that most freely accessible tools cannot answer at all.

A more useful approach starts from the decisions themselves. Funders, policymakers and researchers need to see, at a glance, how products are progressing through the R&D lifecycle, where pipelines are thin, and where approved tools exist but are not yet reaching people. That calls for data structured around real questions: comparable across disease areas and product types, able to show where candidates sit in the clinical pathway and where trials are taking place, and rich enough to reveal change over time rather than a single frozen snapshot.

The new Pipeline Portal does this. Spanning 68 diseases across neglected diseases, emerging infectious diseases and sexual and reproductive health, it brings together pipeline and product data within a consistent framework — from early discovery through to approved products reaching people.

Users can compare across disease areas in the same view: the contrast between a deep, diversified pipeline such as malaria’s and a near-empty one such as Buruli ulcer’s is visible in seconds. A geographic layer shows where clinical trials are concentrated and where developers are based. Most distinctively, the portal’s cross-pipeline analytics let users place up to four disease–product portfolios side by side and track how each has evolved across review years.

Comparing malaria and tuberculosis vaccine pipelines, for instance, upends a first impression: malaria’s Phase III is empty not because the pipeline has stalled but because its most advanced candidates reached approval, and a strong Phase II is replenishing the next wave. Tuberculosis has five candidates in Phase III, yet that number has barely grown in seven years, and its Phase II — the supply line for future late-stage candidates — has contracted. One pipeline is translating; the other risks running dry. That distinction is invisible in any single snapshot, but it is exactly what a funder needs to see.

This is a foundation, not a finished product. A May release will add two further layers: a WHO R&D priority alignment view, mapping priorities against the pipeline to show where investment is matched to need and where it is not; and an AI-powered data search, in beta, that lets users query the pipeline in plain language.

The aim throughout is straightforward: to make the data that already exists work harder for the people who need it most, and to ensure that decisions about where to invest in global health R&D are grounded in evidence that is current, comparable and complete.