Accelerating access to paediatric medicines: lessons learned from the Global Accelerator for Paediatric Formulations, a WHO-hosted network (May 2025)

Summary

Despite progress in reducing neonatal and child mortality, inequalities in access to age-appropriate medicines remain, particularly in low-income and middle-income countries. The Global Accelerator for Paediatric Formulations (GAP-f), a WHO-hosted network established in 2020, addresses these gaps by uniting 33 partners to promote innovation and access to child-friendly medicine formulations. This article describes phase 2 (2022–24) of GAP-f's work, which focused on:

• therapeutic areas where innovation and access efforts often did not have stakeholder alignment and coordination of designing and implementing innovative clinical trial methodology.
• engaging with regulators to address systemic barriers.
• identifying novel technologies for safe and effective delivery.
• collaborating across stakeholders for product roll out.