Innovations to accelerate vaccine development and manufacture

Inno4Vac proposes an ambitious programme that will harness the latest advances in immunology, disease modelling, and modelling for tackling persistent scientific bottlenecks in vaccine development and for de-risking and accelerating this process. The project was launched on 1 September 2021 and will run until February 2027. 

Four main areas are addressed by Inno4vac in an integrated manner: 

1. artificial intelligence will be used for in silico vaccine immune response and efficacy prediction; 
2. a modular computational platform will be developed for in silico modelling of vaccine bio-manufacturing and stability testing;
3. new and improved controlled human infection models (CHIM) of influenza, Respiratory Syncytial Virus (RSV) and Clostridium difficile will be established to enable early vaccine efficacy evaluation;
4. novel cell-based human in vitro 3D models will be developed to reliably predict immune protection.

Consortium

A multidisciplinary consortium from academic and research institutions, industries, regulatory bodies, and vaccine R&D alliances has been assembled. This unique partnership brings together clinical, immunological, microbiological, systems biology, mathematical models, and regulatory expertise and includes world leaders in each respective field.

RIVM role

RIVM has the scientific lead in the project’s Subtopic 3 ‘Human in vitro 3D mucosa models and assays’ and contributes to Work Package 12 ‘3D in vitro Models and assays: Roadmap, standardisation and guidelines’. In addition, RIVM leads Work Package 14 ‘Development of respiratory models and assay prototypes’. The main aim of this latter Work Package is to implement advanced next-generation respiratory mucosal models to evaluate vaccine-induced protective and detrimental immune responses in the context of infections with influenza virus and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV).

By participating in this project, RIVM expects to contribute to new knowledge and methodologies in the field of correlates of protection against pathogens, advancing disease prevention by vaccines. 

RIVM colleagues involved are: Cecile van Els, Puck van Kasteren, Rob Vandebriel and Jeroen Pennings.

Funding

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No .101007799.