The WHO R&D Blueprint published three pathogen-family roadmaps in Q1 2026: Filovirus on 3 March (covering Ebola and Marburg), Arenaviridae on 12 March (covering Lassa, Junin and other haemorrhagic fevers), and Paramyxovirus on 31 March (covering Nipah, Hendra and measles). Public consultations on all three remain open through late May, with input invited from research institutes, regulators, industry and national authorities.
The family-level shift matters because of how single-pathogen plans tend to fail. A Lassa roadmap concentrates capacity on Lassa-specific antigens, animal models and assay platforms, and leaves a research base poorly equipped when a Junin or Machupo variant surfaces. The arenavirus family shares enough viral biology that a platform tuned to Lassa, with the right adjustments, can be repurposed faster than starting from scratch; the same logic runs for the henipaviruses inside the Paramyxovirus group, where a Nipah vaccine candidate offers a head start against a future Hendra-like emergence. Family roadmaps formalise that logic and direct funders toward platforms with cross-protective potential rather than narrow single-pathogen investments.
The Arenaviridae roadmap is the one that lands closest to the rest of this briefing. Argentina carries both the Andes virus strain at the heart of the MV Hondius cluster in Patagonia and Junin virus in the Pampas grain belt, which together make the country one of the densest zoonotic-spillover environments on the public record. A coordinated arenavirus-and-hantavirus medical-countermeasure programme in Argentina would link surveillance, sample collection and clinical-trial capacity that currently sits in three separate ministries. The roadmap creates the funding rationale for that coordination, even if the consolidation itself is a national rather than a WHO decision.
Public input on all three roadmaps closes in late May 2026, after which the World Health Organization moves to finalisation and CEPI, GAVI and national funders begin matching pipeline calls to roadmap priorities. National research councils that miss the consultation window forfeit influence on the funding cascade that follows. The roadmaps themselves are not vaccines; they are the upstream prioritisation document that determines which candidates reach Phase 1 in the next funding cycle. Whether they translate into product depends on the same supply-chain, manufacturing and regulatory machinery now under stress in the H5N1 programme. The structural risk to watch is that the roadmaps become reference documents rather than money flows.
