The Human Vaccines Project emphasizes immune response.
The Human Vaccines Project, a public-private partnership with a mission to decode the immune system to advance human health, announced the launch of the Universal Influenza Vaccine Initiative, the first of its kind, according to the group, to address the “underlying scientific barrier impeding the development of broadly protective, universal influenza vaccines: the human immune response.”
Influenza is estimated by the World Health Organization (WHO), to kill as many as 500,000 people around the world annually. However, a universal vaccine would work to immunize entire populations, thus minimizing the risk of a global pandemic.
Noting that this is an overdue challenge, Wayne C. Koff, President and CEO of the Human Vaccines Project said, “The public health disaster of the 1918 pandemic that infected a third of the world's population and killed over 50 million, looms heavy. While great progress has been made in understanding the influenza virus, seasonal vaccines are not consistently effective and people remain highly vulnerable.”
Led by Dr. James Crowe Jr., of Vanderbilt University’s Vanderbilt Vaccine Center, the initiative will launch a series of influenza vaccine clinical trials among globally diverse populations beginning in 2018. According to the announcement, researchers based at the University of California San Diego, The Scripps Research Institute, the La Jolla Institute for Allergy and Immunology, and the J. Craig Venter Institute, as well as partners from the University of British Columbia and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, will do the broad-spectrum analysis of samples.
Blood and tissue samples taken from vaccinated and infected individuals, in combination with artificial intelligence-driven computer simulation models, will help decipher the elements of protection against influenza and determine outcomes of vaccination, such as why some are protected while others are not.
"Understanding how all elements of the human immune system function together to recognize diverse viruses is the key to a universally effective influenza vaccine,” explained Crowe. “Until now, we have lacked the biomedical and computational tools to probe the complex and dynamic features of the human immune system in a complete way.”
With the right technology, he said, “we can decipher the core principles behind how the immune system protects vulnerable populations, and develop a full understanding of how it prevents and controls influenza to inform the development of a universally effective vaccine."