Novel multivalent vaccines against haemorrhagic fevers

Recent outbreaks of Ebola, MERS and Zika viruses have highlighted the lack of global preparedness and viable therapeutic solutions for known outbreak pathogens. To prepare for the control of future outbreaks, vaccine candidates against 'priority pathogens', as identified by the UK vaccines network and other organisations, should be taken forward into clinical development and tested for safety, immunogenicity and, wherever possible, efficacy. To be viable, new vaccine platforms will need to be 1) immunologically effective over time, 2) reliably deployable, and 3) cost effective. Monovalent vaccines, administered singularly against individual viruses, will be prohibitively expensive to develop for all ‘priority pathogens’ and burdensome to deploy in the prophylactic setting.

Here, we propose to develop efficacious and cost-effective multivalent vaccines against several lethal haemorrhagic fever-causing viruses endemic in Africa, including Filoviruseses (Ebolaviruses & Marburg virus) and Arenaviruses (Lassa virus). Multivalent vaccines will allow the development and production outlays to be greatly reduced, and will increase the probability that vaccines against most, rather than a select few, pathogens will be available.

Our pre-developed core vaccine platforms (viral vectors) have proven capability of expressing multiple antigens and inducing durable immune responses in other infectious disease settings. For each of the multivalent vaccines against outbreak pathogens that we develop, preclinical testing will be conducted to identify the vaccines which induce ‘best–in-class’ immune responses and are most suitable for clinical manufacture (GMP) and field use. By assessing several combinations of different antigens in two different viral vector platforms, we will optimise the chances of developing vaccination regimens suitable for both prophylactic and outbreak response settings.

At the end of this work, we will have developed, tested and produced pre-GMP stocks as scalable vaccine solutions for deployment against Filoviruses and an Arenavirus and will have developed scalable platform modalities that can be used in other outbreak scenarios.