|PIC1|Chancellor Gordon Brown has extended a personal invitation to Pope Benedict XVI to visit Britain yesterday during an audience with the Pope in Rome.

At the meeting yesterday in the Vatican, the Pope urged Mr Brown and other finance ministers to tackle the problem of global poverty and the widening gap between the rich and poor, according to The Guardian.

The Chancellor, meanwhile, introduced the launch of a scheme aimed at providing life-saving vaccines to millions of children in the developing world.

Drug companies will be urged to develop vaccines for pneumococcal disease after Britain joined forces with Italy, Canada and Norway to create a £750m fund to encourage them. The disease kills 1.6 million people each year, including 1 million children under five.

It is hoped the advance market commitment fund will speed provision of protection against the illness to 100 million children and save 5 million lives by 2030.

In addition, a new financial mechanism, AMC, has been introduced. AMC works by providing a ready market for drugs which are desperately needed in poorer countries and by giving these nations the purchasing power to obtain discounted prices for the medicines when they become available.

A vaccine for pneumococcal disease has been chosen as the target for the first AMC, because the condition is the leading cause of child pneumonia deaths, as well as the second leading cause of childhood meningitis deaths.

The launch of the AMC took place at the Italian government's finance ministry in Rome, and was attended by Mr Brown along with Queen Rania of Jordan, the president of the World Bank, Paul Wolfowitz, and ministers from Italy, Canada, Norway and Ghana.

The Chancellor told the event: "The advanced market mechanism we launch today means that - instead of high costs, low volume drug production as in the past - we can have high volume, low cost production of drugs in the future and ensure that the many will not be denied the medical advances available to the few."

A Treasury spokesman said Mr Brown also spoke "privately" with the Pope. The Chancellor gave him a book of collected sermons by his father, John, a Church of Scotland minister, and received a Vatican medal.

The meeting with the Pope comes shortly after the UK Government clashed with the Roman Catholic Church over plans to require all adoption agencies to handle requests for help from gay couples.