WHO Member States held their second intergovernmental meeting from 15-19 September, to further develop the Pathogens Access and Benefit Sharing (PABS) system, a critical annex to the WHO Pandemic Agreement.

The PABS system aims to enable safe, transparent and accountable access and benefit-sharing for pathogen materials and sequence information, as well as equitable, rapid and timely sharing of vaccines, therapeutics, diagnostics and other resulting benefits.  

As part of its adoption of the WHO Pandemic Agreement in May 2025, the World Health Assembly established the open-ended Intergovernmental Working Group (IGWG) to undertake several tasks, including, as a priority, to draft and negotiate the PABS annex to the Agreement.

The Assembly decided that the outcome of the IGWG’s work would be submitted to the Seventy-ninth World Health Assembly in 2026 for consideration.