Access to COVID-19 Tools Accelerator Diagnostics Partnership (ACT-A DX) to address the global diagnostic challenges with a focus on LMICs. The Foundation for Innovative New Diagnostics (FIND) is one of the six partners under the Product Development Partnership Fund III (#27528). FIND has been appointed to co-convene the Access to COVID-19 Tools Accelerator Diagnostics Partnership (ACT-A DX) with The Global Fund, following submission of an investment case to the Access to COVID-19 Tools Accelerator (ACT-A) initiative. The ACT-Accelerator, is a new, ground-breaking global collaboration to accelerate the development, production, and equitable access to COVID-19 tests, treatments, and vaccines. It is a framework for collaboration that has been designed to bring key players around the table with the goal of ending the pandemic as quickly as possible through the accelerated development, equitable allocation, and scaled up delivery of tests, treatments and vaccines, thereby protecting health systems and restoring societies and economies in the near term. Its members share a commitment to ensure all people have access to all the tools needed to defeat COVID-19 and to work with unprecedented levels of partnership to achieve it. The ACT-Accelerator has four areas of work: diagnostics, therapeutics, vaccines, and the health system connector. Cross cutting all of these is the workstream on access and allocation. Under this framework, ACT-A Dx brings together global stakeholders, leveraging their complementary strengths to address the diagnostics challenges that are being faced globally during COVID-19, with a focus on LMICs. The scope of the ACT-A Dx work is significant as it covers the development-to-delivery value chain from end to end, i.e. from product development (R<(>&<)>D for both diagnostics and digital tools); to market readiness of products; to country preparedness for product introduction and uptake; to procurement and supply of those products to LMICs for use. There has been intense demand for COVID-19 testing and a commensurate response from developers and manufacturers. However, this response, with it is expensive lab-based technologies, has benefitted high income countries and has not had any impact for more vulnerable populations in LMICs. ACT-A Dxactivities are designed to address this imbalance in access. It has been estimated that 500 million diagnostics tests will be needed in LMICs over the next 12 months, and that 75% of these will need to be appropriate for use in decentralized settings (i.e. primary health care, community level care). The ACT-A Dx will be working towards this common goal by addressing challenges around availability, performance, pricing, and supply at volume to LMICs. This initiative will also have a ripple effect on lowering costs for high income countries because of the focus of the partnership on low cost yet high-quality tests. The proposed activities will cover five of the eleven work streams into which ACT-A Dx activities are divided. The central workstreams that our funding would be allocated to are as follows: 1. WS1: Develop well-performing Ag RDTs with assured production capacity 2. WS 2: Develop well-performing POC molecular tests with assured production capacity 3. WS 5: Accelerate product development and countries’ test selection through open access resources (e.g., biobanking, data visualization, landscaping, feasibility and evaluation platform) 4. WS 9 : Develop innovative and integrated delivery models to support country policies and uptake for effective test, trace, isolate and surveillance strategies 5. WS 11: ACT-A Dx coordination With this BEMO, the EUR 5 million of additional support for FIND – as mentioned in the letter to parliament of 10 July 2020 (ref: BZ DOC-906517737-64 ) – is operationalized. To support the COVID-19 response, FIND and Unitaid worked together and invested more than US$ 28M to accelerate the global supply and availability of quality-assured tests for SARS-CoV-2 through the following activities: providing funding to support capacity expansion, supporting market-shaping activities for access pricing, building/expanding local manufacturing capacity in LMICs through technology transfers, providing technical assistance with manufacturing, supporting regulatory procedures, supporting market entry and ensuring high-volume commitment and distribution of supplies. FIND did not only contribute to developing diagnostics for COVID-19, but also for more than 18 other diseases. It contributed significantly to improving in country diagnostic capacity by investing in the development of these diagnostics, as well as advocacy and training of personnel to carry out the diagnostic tests appropriately.