Conference: Coordinating the development of self-disseminating vaccines for spillover prevention

将在俄勒冈州波特兰举办一次研讨会，审议有关开发可传播疫苗的问题。事实证明，人畜共患病病原体的外溢很难控制，而且几乎不可能消除。尽管使用标准方法的动物疫苗接种计划在某些情况下减轻了溢出的负担(例如狂犬病、布鲁氏菌病)，但其他地区继续遭受溢出，因为后勤和财政挑战使向野生动物和家养动物种群提供大量疫苗不切实际。这一问题的一个新解决方案是将良性的自然产生的病毒转化为能够自我传播的疫苗，即可传播的疫苗。越来越多的理论表明，疫苗传播使消除难以接触和难以接种动物种群的溢出风险成为可能，而成本仅为传统的一种疫苗-一种宿主疫苗接种活动所需费用的一小部分。这种疫苗在实验室生产越来越可行，但许多技术挑战和悬而未决的问题支撑着它们在自然系统中安全有效地实施。这次研讨会将通过聚集免疫学家、疫苗工程师、病毒学家、疾病生态学家、进化生物学家和数学模型师来协调可传播疫苗的开发。研讨会的一个重要目标是增加从事这项新兴技术的社区的多样性，特别关注增加早期职业科学家、女性和来自该技术可能对人类健康产生最直接积极影响的低中等收入国家的科学家的代表性。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

A workshop will be held in Portland, Oregon to consider the issues concerning the development of a transmissible vaccine. Spillover of zoonotic pathogens has proven difficult to control and virtually impossible to eliminate. Although animal vaccination programs using standard methods have reduced the burden of spillover in some cases (e.g., rabies, brucellosis), other regions endure continued spillover because logistical and financial challenges make delivering large quantities of vaccine to wild and domestic animal populations impractical. A novel solution to this problem is the transformation of benign, naturally-occurring viruses into into vaccines capable of self dissemination, i.e., transmissible vaccines. A growing body of theory shows that vaccine transmission makes it possible to eliminate the risk of spillover from hard to reach and difficult to vaccinate animal populations at a fraction of the cost that would be required via traditional one vaccine-one host vaccination campaigns. Such vaccines are increasingly feasible to generate in the laboratory, but many technical challenges and unresolved questions underpin their safe and effective implementation in natural systems. This workshop will coordinate the development of transmissible vaccines by bringing together immunologists, vaccine engineers, virologists, disease ecologists, evolutionary biologists, and mathematical modelers. An important goal of the workshop will be to increase the diversity of the community working on this emerging technology, with a specific focus on increasing the representation of early career scientists, women, and scientists from lower middle-income countries where the technology may have the most immediate positive impacts on human health.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.