The shortest time a vaccine has ever been produced is 326 days after Chinese scientists published the Sars-Cov-2 viral genome in January 2020 and the approval of BioNTech/Pfizer vaccine the following December.
Two Kenyan institutes were this week accepted into a global network aiming to have a vaccine approved for emergency use within 100 days of a virus being recognised as a pandemic threat by the scientific community and its genetic sequence released.
The two are Kavi Institute of Clinical Research and the University of Nairobi’s Institute of Tropical and Infectious Diseases.
They are now one of the 15 partner facilities of the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, a global partnership between governments, charities and industry set up in 2017, to develop vaccines against future epidemics.
Cepi said the two Kenyan institutions will receive technology transfer and will benefit from the know-how of scientists in other laboratories, the majority of them in Europe.
In the interim, the facilities will support vaccine development against one or more of CEPI’s priority diseases—Chikungunya, Lassa virus, MERS, Nipah, Rift Valley Fever, SARS-CoV-2.
Prof Omu Anzala, the team leader at KAVI-ICR and Unitid said infectious disease outbreaks are becoming more frequent for a variety of reasons.
“Not a day goes by without a notification of an outbreak in one part of the world or the other,” he said.
He noted the two institutes, based at UoN, will become better equipped going into the future.
“The participation of global south will enhance technology transfer, significantly reduce sample shipment logistics and improve on the turnaround time. We therefore look forward to participating fully in the network,” he added.
CEPI’s Centralized Laboratory Network now has 15 partner facilities— including the two Kenyan partners—in 13 countries.
The CLN is the largest global group using the same methods and materials, like reagents—substances used to carry out a scientific test—to standardise and accelerate the evaluation of vaccines against epidemic and pandemic diseases.
In the event of an outbreak of infectious disease, having an established global clinical laboratory network in place will facilitate faster data readouts by harmonising analyses and reducing sample shipping times due to its worldwide footprint, Cepi said in a statement.
“CLN is a key enabler of CEPI’s 100 Days Mission, which aims to reduce vaccine development timelines to just 100 days, by helping researchers and regulators to evaluate the most promising vaccine candidates quickly and accurately when faced with a future ‘Disease X’ – a newly identified pathogen with epidemic or pandemic potential,” Cepi said.
Its head of vaccine research and development Dr Melanie Saville said vaccine developers around the world who are working on epidemic or pandemic infectious diseases must have the same level of scientific research and resource available to them to best prepare for future outbreaks.
“Expanding the footprint of CEPI’s Centralised Laboratory Network to include additional expert facilities in the Global South will help to reduce sample transfer and testing times, potentially accelerating the development of vaccines against emerging infectious diseases while supporting sustainable and resilient regional outbreak preparedness infrastructure,” she said.
During the typical vaccine evaluation process, the immune response generated by each vaccine candidate under development is assessed using different tools and measurements at individual testing sites, allowing for variability in results.
For example, there may be variation in the way in which different types of immune biomarkers, like antibodies and T-cells—which are crucial when evaluating the efficacy of a vaccine—are measured.
Technical differences in how and where vaccine clinical trial samples are collected, transported, and stored can also occur, impacting the quality and usefulness of the data produced and making comparisons between measurements, and between vaccine candidates, difficult.
By following the same protocols and using the same biological reagents, laboratories within CEPI’s network can instead ensure uniformity in the assessment of multiple different vaccine candidates, which can in turn accelerate the development of new vaccines.
-Edited by SKanyara
