UK vaccine volunteers to help prepare for next virus at new Pandemic Institute

 A new science lab aimed at preventing future pandemics could save thousands of lives by speeding up vaccine development if vaccine development existed before December 2019. Researchers believe it.

Liverpool's new Pandemic Institute will feature a new Human Challenge facility where volunteers will test new vaccines and treatments under controlled conditions.

According to Professor Daniela Ferreira, director of clinical sciences at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine (LSTM) and one of the new labs, if a vaccine candidate could have been tested in the first wave of infection, Jab would have been ready for a few months since. team.

LSTM is one of seven municipal universities, hospitals and municipalities behind the institute, launched on Monday with £ 10million in funding from Innova Medical Group.

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Research into human issues is already underway in hospitals, but the Pandemic Institute will set up high-level containment facilities outside the hospital to speed up the process.

“Here in Liverpool, we managed one of the phase 3 sites for vaccine research in Oxford,” said Ferreira. “We were able to put it in place very quickly. When the government implemented the blockade of the country, the number of incidents plummeted. We expected the results of the vaccine study to be available in three months. community was less infected.

If the Pandemic Institute facility were available in January 2020, the first prototypes of antivirals and vaccines could have been tested for their effectiveness in the first wave.

If the vaccine were available for testing in the first wave, Ferreira could have been ready "at least three months" before the second wave began in October, in which 80,000 people died.

“A controlled model gives us a much faster idea of ​​how effective a vaccine is,” Ferreira said.

One of the main approaches of the new lab is to create a database of diseases affecting animals, which are most likely, as new viruses are often zoonotic diseases that are transmitted from animals to humans. fence.

Professor Matthew Baylis of the University of Liverpool said: 'We are using it to drive part of the work of predicting which animal the next coronavirus will come from, etc. "

With only 1,500 species of bats, the work is enormous. "I hope that within 10 years, we will be more precise on the species to observe and that we will be able to actually observe some of these species to confirm our predictions.

“At some point in the future we should be able to catch the virus and know what it can do. It's a very ambitious idea, but everything is included in the [genetic] sequence. In the future At some point a new virus is discovered, and without waiting for what it does, "it seems to have these properties and can be transmitted in this way and cause this kind of disease".

This in turn will give vaccine researchers significant advantages over current technology.

Several other organizations similar to the Pandemic Institute have been established around the world. This month, the World Health Organization opened an intelligence center on pandemics and epidemics in Berlin, the French government launched Prezode, an international initiative focused on zoonotic diseases, and the Rockefeller Foundation launched the 'Institute for Pandemic Prevention.

Mr Bayliss said he hopes for strong international cooperation and plans to establish three centers in East, West and Southern Africa to work with local researchers.

Professor Henry Mwandamba, acting director of the Malawi-Liverpool-Welcome clinical research program, said collaboration with the Pandemic Institute will strengthen cooperation between Malawi and the UK.

“I think the response to the pandemic has certainly been faster [by the lab] in Malawi and other countries with limited resources. We were able to mobilize the necessary resources to deal with the pandemic. There had to be a system that didn't exist. before the pandemic. "