Sanofi Pasteur to join the Human Vaccines Project
pharmafile | January 15, 2016 | News story | Medical Communications, Research and Development | Human Vaccines Project, Sanofi Pasteur, vaccines
Sanofi Pasteur has become the latest pharma company to add funding to The Human Vaccines Project – a non-profit public-private partnership aiming to accelerate vaccines and immunotherapies for major infectious diseases and cancers.
Sanofi Pasteur will provide research funding to oversee, coordinate and conduct the scientific and administrative activities of the Human Vaccines Project research program this year. The funds will be used to launch and execute pilot studies, build partnerships with and across the stakeholder community, and set up the infrastructure and operational support program.
Sanofi Pasteur, the vaccines division of Sanofi, is one of the world’s largest vaccine companies in its own right. It is the fourth company to join the Project, and will provide funding while joining the Industry Steering Committee. Sanofi Pasteur joins GlaxoSmithKline, Medimmune, and Crucell (one of the Janssen Pharmaceutical Companies of Johnson & Johnson), as industrial partners of a project that has been endorsed as potentially transformative by 35 of the world’s leading vaccine scientists.
“The Human Vaccines Project has established a unique public-private partnership model with transformative potential for prevention and control of major global diseases of the 21st century, by engaging industry from the outset together with key stakeholders from academia, governments and non-governmental organisations,” says Wayne Koff, co-founder of the Human Vaccines Project and chief scientific officer of the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative (IAVI).
“We are very pleased that Sanofi Pasteur brings its wealth of experience in vaccine R&D to help guide the Project as it addresses the key scientific challenges impeding development of next generation vaccines and immunotherapies.”
Harnessing recent technological breakthroughs from genomics, systems biology and bioinformatics, the Project is establishing a global consortium to undertake an ambitious, decade-long scientific plan which ultimately aims to ‘decode the human immune system.’
The goals of the Project include: deciphering the human immunome, the ‘parts list’ of the immune system, to provide a vital open resource for the scientific community to aid with next generation vaccine discovery; establishing the ‘rules of immunogenicity’, the optimal immunisation strategies required to prevent and control major infectious and neoplastic diseases; and optimising ‘immunologic fitness’ in heterogeneous global populations including infants, the elderly and immunocompromised, in an attempt to usher in a new era of vaccine development and cancer immunotherapy.
Joel Levy
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