Medical research foundations Wellcome and The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation joined forces with payments major Mastercard on Tuesday to set up $125 million in seed funding to speed-up the response to the novel coronavirus (Covid-19) epidemic by identifying assessing developing and scaling-up treatments. The Covid-19 Therapeutics Accelerator as the three partners call it aims to play a catalytic role by accelerating and evaluating new and repurposed drugs and biologics to treat patients with coronavirus in the immediate term and other viral pathogens in the longer term. Currently there are no broad-spectrum antivirals or immunotherapies available for the fight against