Supporting vaccine development for Emerging Diseases

The timely development of vaccines to emergent diseases require research tools and reference materials. Our specialist containment facilities and experienced staff, enables us to respond when a novel disease emerges.

Within the NIBSC, the Division of Infectious Disease Diagnostics works closely with the Division of Virology and external organisations such as Dstl and PHE to develop models that are applied in support of the establishment of appropriate standards and reference materials for vaccines.

These models are used to:

• Establish the scientific basis for vaccine protection
• Evaluate whether sera from clinical trials volunteers can protect in vivo.
• Elucidate the importance of particular protective responses in pathogenesis or disease.

This work has attracted significant external grant funding from Innovate UK and UKRI.

Key publications:

High susceptibility, viral dynamics and persistence of South American Zika virus in New World monkey species. Sci Rep. 2019; 9: 14495.

Towards quantification of protective antibody responses by passive transfer of the 1st WHO International Standard for Ebola virus antibody in a guinea pig model. Vaccine. 2020 Jan 10;38(2):345-349.

Antibody-mediated protection against MERS-CoV in the murine model. Vaccine. 2019 Jul 9;37(30):4094-4102.

Utility of reference materials for Zika Virus nucleic acid testing. Biologicals. 2019 Sep; 61:55-60.