Ridgefield’s Boehringer Ingelheim launches Global Support Program to fight COVID-19

Boehringer Ingelheim has established a Global Support Program to bring more financial relief, protective materials and medicine donations to health care institutions and communities in need around the world.

The pharmaceutical company, whose North American headquarters are in Ridgefield, initially started with donations totaling over $1.5 million in January for affected regions in China. With COVID-19 now a global pandemic, Boehringer has created the program with four focus areas:

Donations
The company has made available $6.4 million for financial and in-kind donations for local emergency aid across its markets. It is also working with local organizations that use financial and medicine donations to organize help for patients in their communities.

Research for COVID-19 therapies
Since January, a growing team of 100 Boehringer scientists from all areas of research and development has contributed to projects aimed at finding potential treatment solutions for COVID-19.

Moreover, an increasing number of collaboration partners and service providers is bolstering the team”™s efforts. Most of the projects are part of larger collaborative efforts with academia, biotech and other pharma companies. Among them is a call by the Innovative Medicines Initiative of the European Union, to which Boehringer Ingelheim is planning to commit in excess of 11,000 work hours in R&D.

The company has also joined the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation COVID-19 Therapeutics Accelerator. In addition, Boehringer Ingelheim supports scientists worldwide with its open innovation portal opnMe.com, which offers six anti-viral compounds out of 43 high quality pharmacological tool compounds at no cost for testing of research hypotheses.

Volunteering
Boehringer is offering all of its 51,000 employees the opportunity to take up to 10 days of paid leave to join approved external organizations as a volunteer to bring COVID-19 relief. Employees may choose to volunteer with community partners or with other nonprofit organizations in their communities.

Making More Health relief fund
Over $630,000 in relief funds have been launched to support the global Making More Health network of social entrepreneurs in Kenya and India, as well as the communities in which they live and work.

The fund will help social enterprises and their activities to sustain a longer period of low economic activity and will invest in social entrepreneurial ideas that can help reduce the risk of the coronavirus spreading.

More information on the various COVID-19 initiatives under the Global Support Program are available here.