Hub to Drive Vaccine Discovery and Manufacture Forward

A new Future Vaccine Manufacturing Research Hub, will bring together academia, industry and policy makers to affect radical change in the development and manufacturing of vaccines and improve responses to outbreaks of deadly pandemics such as Swine Flu and Ebola.

Led by UCL and the University of Oxford, Vax-Hub will look to establish the UK as a global centre for vaccine discovery, development and manufacture, while also ensuring that new vaccine manufacturing processes can be used in low and middle income countries.

The multidisciplinary team assembled at the Hub will work to address five major challenges facing vaccine manufacturing and deployment:

The time new vaccines take to progress to market

Guaranteeing long lasting supply, especially of older, legacy vaccines

Reducing the risk of failure in moving between different vaccine types, scales of manufacture and locations

Mitigating costs

And responding to threats and future epidemics and pandemics

In addition the tools and technologies developed by the researchers, who have decades of cumulative experience in all aspects of vaccine design and manufacturing research, will be applicable for medical products intended for the UK.

The Hub has been awarded almost £7 million of UK Aid funding from the Department of Health and Social Care, which will be managed by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC).