Better vaccines for poverty-related diseases
Vaccine development for poverty-related diseases such as malaria, tuberculosis and HIV infection are faced with many challenges. These include difficulties in accessing know-how and technology platforms, vaccine formulation and delivery, harmonising safety data collection, and insufficient numbers of trained scientists. Developing vaccines against poverty-related diseases is challenging given the lack of comprehension regarding stimulating appropriate immune responses for these diseases. Also, the methods for inducing strong cytotoxic lymphocyte responses without using live viral vectors are limited. Furthermore, there are insufficient animal models that reliably mimic the human disease and can predict the safety and efficacy of the vaccine in humans. The EU-funded INYVAX (Optimisation of the development of poverty-related-diseases (PRD) vaccines by a transversal approach, addressing common gaps and challenges) project wished to address these issues through a number of innovations. Firstly, the consortium established a comprehensive database of the vaccine technologies available in Europe. The publicly available database had provided information on formulations, capacity for scale-up, regulatory support and clinical trial expertise. It also included all the European projects dealing with vaccine research or vaccine development. Partners opened the European branch of the global adjuvant network, AdjuNet and implemented the global adjuvant development initiative (GADI) reference laboratory, which is able to provide several adjuvants and formulations for the development of vaccines. To harmonise safety assessment in clinical trials of poverty-related disease vaccines, INYVAX performed meta-analysis of similar studies on vaccine testing and developed safety guidelines, which were disseminated to regulatory authorities worldwide. Furthermore, the consortium set up an advanced vaccinology course to expose trainees to the many different facets of vaccinology. Topics of the course included pre-clinical vaccine research, design and monitoring of clinical trials, vaccine safety issues, as well as new vaccination strategies. Taken together, the INYVAX study provided the requisite information and resources for building a strong vaccine network to significantly improve vaccine development in the world and provide solid solutions against poverty-related diseases.
Keywords
Vaccine, poverty-related diseases, INYVAX, database, clinical trial
