Four days ago, the first volunteer was vaccinated against Bundibugyo ebolavirus. That is just 68 days after the World Health Organization declared the current Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and Uganda a public-health emergency of international concern. By 27 July, officials had confirmed 3,200 cases and 1,405 deaths in the DRC alone. The vaccine, called ChAdOx1, is being tested in a phase I clinical trial being run by the Oxford Vaccine Group at the University of Oxford, UK. ChAdOx1 uses the same vector platform as used in the Oxford'AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine, but carries genetic instructions for Bundibugyo ebolavirus protein. Around 620,000 doses of the vaccine have already been manufactured. The trial aims to assess the safety of the vaccine and the immune response it generates before larger trials are rolled out in Uganda later this year. Two other vaccines are also in development: an mRNA vaccine developed by Moderna in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which is expected to go into clinical trials next month; and a candidate being developed by the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative that is similar to the WHO-recommended one for the Zaire ebolavirus species. All three vaccines are being funded by the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI)....
For the third quarter in the past year, Mexico-based companies raised more venture capital in Q2 than their Brazilian counterparts, Crunchbase data on startup funding in Latin America shows, as Silicon Valley investors including Founders Fund and Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) led some of the largest deals in the region. Mexico's startups led the LatAm pack in Q2 ' by a wide margin. The country's startups raised $944 million in the second quarter, up 131% compared to $409 million in last year's Q2, and up 136% from the $401 million raised in this year's first quarter, per Crunchbase data. For comparison's sake, that's almost as much as Latin American startups as a whole raised in the second quarter of 2025. In general, a continued boom in late-stage and growth funding helped buoy the region for the period, Crunchbase data shows. Startups in Latin America raised a combined $1.36 billion across seed- and growth-stage deals in the second quarter, up 47% year over year and 22% from the first quarter....
On 17 May the World Health Organization (WHO) declared an ongoing Ebola outbreak a public health emergency of international concern. Centred on the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda, the outbreak has seen mounting numbers of suspected cases and deaths linked to the rare Bundibugyo species of Ebola virus....
A boom in late-stage and growth funding helped buoy venture funding in Latin America for the first quarter of 2026, Crunchbase data shows. Startups in Latin America raised a combined $1.03 billion across seed- and growth-stage deals in the three-month period ending March 31. That was up 12% year over year and down 6% from the fourth quarter. Of that total, $761 million went into late-stage and growth deals, up 158% compared to the $295 million that flowed into such deals in the first quarter of 2025. It's also up 203% compared with the $251 million in late-stage and growth rounds that were raised by LatAm startups in the 2025 fourth quarter. Nearly one-third of the total amount raised in the first quarter went to one startup. Mexico City-based Kavak, an online used car marketplace, secured a $300 million Series F financing led by Andreessen Horowitz and WCM Investment Management in February. Historically, Brazil has been the powerhouse in Latin America for venture capital funding. But it's not the first time in recent quarters that Mexico has topped Latin America's largest country. Mexico also raised more funding in the second quarter of 2025....
