The Future Vaccine Manufacturing Research Hub (Vax-Hub)

疫苗是世纪最成功的公共卫生举措。它们每年拯救数百万人的生命，为全球经济增加数十亿美元，并将预期寿命平均延长30年。尽管如此，联合国估计，全球每年有600万儿童在5岁生日前死亡。虽然疫苗确实可以预防这些死亡，但生产能力、技术、成本和物流方面的限制使我们无法接触到最脆弱的群体。英国在疫苗研究方面处于世界领先地位，并在几次公共卫生突发事件中发挥了重要的领导作用，其中最引人注目的是2009年的猪流感大流行和最近在西非爆发的埃博拉疫情。虽然对早期疫苗发现进行了重大投资，但在制造科学或能力方面却没有进行匹配。因此，英国领先的科学家被迫转向海外，将他们的产品商业化。因此，对未来疫苗制造中心的投资将使我们的愿景成为全球疫苗发现，开发和制造中心。我们将创建一个疫苗制造中心，汇集一个世界一流的多学科团队，在疫苗设计和制造研究的各个方面积累了数十年的经验。该中心将汇集学术界、产业界和政策制定者，共同提出疫苗开发和生产技术的根本性变革，使产出适合低收入和中等收入国家。该行业面临的疫苗生产挑战是：（i）缩短上市时间，（ii）保证长期供应-特别是较老的传统疫苗，（iii）减少在不同疫苗类型、生产规模和地点之间转移失败的风险，（iv）降低成本，（v）应对威胁和未来的流行病或大流行病。这项工作更加复杂，因为没有适用于所有疾病和情况的通用疫苗类型或制造方法。因此，该制造中心将研究广泛适用于一系列现有和未来疫苗的通用工具和技术。该工作将集中在两个主要研究主题上：（A）降低扩大规模风险并实现快速反应的工具和技术，以及（B）用于不间断、低成本疫苗供应的经济和运营工具。第一个研究主题旨在创造一种设备，可以在投入资源进行开发之前预测疫苗是否可以扩大规模进行商业生产。它将包括研究高效纯化系统的资金，以降低成本，并使用遗传工具来提高疫苗滴度。研究新型热稳定配方将最大限度地减少疫苗浪费，并确保疫苗在分销链中存活下来。第二个研究主题将旨在揭开疫苗开发和分配的经济学神秘面纱，并允许确定关键的成本瓶颈，以推动研究优先事项。它还将评估第一个研究主题取得的进展的影响，以确保疫苗的最终成本适合发展中国家。 该中心将是英国的布恩，因为这项对通用工具和技术的研究将适用于英国的医疗产品，并确保NHS的价格仍然可以接受。它将使英国成为端到端疫苗研究和制造的国际中心。此外，疫苗应被视为国家安全的优先事项，因为疾病不分国界，因此这项能力建设和快速反应的工作是一个重大优势。该中心的影响将在国际上感受到，因为联合王国重申其在全球卫生方面的领导地位，并努力确保该中心的产出惠及最弱势群体，特别是儿童。

Vaccines are the most successful public health initiative of the 20th century. They save millions of lives annually, add billions to the global economy and extended life expectancy by an average of 30 years. Even so, the UN estimates that globally 6 million children each year die before their 5th birthday. While vaccines do exist to prevent these deaths, it is limitations in manufacturing capacity, technology, costs and logistics that prevent us for reaching the most vulnerable. The UK is a world leader in vaccine research and has played a significant leadership role in several public health emergencies, most notably the Swine Flu pandemic in 2009 and the recent Ebola outbreak in West Africa. While major investment has been made into early vaccine discovery - this has not been matched in the manufacturing sciences or capacity. Consequently, leading UK scientists are forced to turn overseas to commercialise their products.Therefore, this investment into The Future Vaccine Manufacturing Hub will enable our vision to make the UK the global centre for vaccine discovery, development and manufacture. We will create a vaccine manufacturing hub that brings together a world-class multidisciplinary team with decades of cumulative experience in all aspects of vaccine design and manufacturing research. This Hub will bring academia, industry and policy makers together to propose radical change in vaccine development and manufacturing technologies, such that the outputs are suitable for Low and Middle Income Countries.The vaccine manufacturing challenges faced by the industry are to (i) decrease time to market, (ii) guarantee long lasting supply - especially of older, legacy vaccine, (iii) reduce the risk of failure in moving between different vaccine types, scales of manufacture and locations, (iv) mitigating costs and (v) responding to threats and future epidemics or pandemics. This work is further complicated as there is no generic vaccine type or manufacturing approach suitable for all diseases and scenarios. Therefore this manufacturing Hub will research generic tools and technologies that are widely applicable to a range of existing and future vaccines.The work will focus on two main research themes (A) Tools and Technologies to de-risk scale-up and enable rapid response, and (B) Economic and Operational Tools for uninterrupted, low cost supply of vaccines. The first research theme seeks to create devices that can predict if a vaccine can be scaled-up for commercial manufacture before committing resources for development. It will include funds to study highly efficient purification systems, to drive costs down and use genetic tools to increase vaccine titres. Work in novel thermo-stable formulations will minimise vaccine wastage and ensure that vaccines survive the distribution chain. The second research theme will aim to demystify the economics of vaccine development and distribution and allow the identification of critical cost bottlenecks to drive research priorities. It will also assess the impact of the advances made in the first research theme to ensure that the final cost of the vaccine is suitable for the developing world. The Hub will be a boon for the UK, as this research into generic tools and technologies will be applicable for medical products intended for the UK and ensure that prices remain accessible for the NHS. It will establish the UK as the international centre for end-to-end vaccine research and manufacture. Additionally, vaccines should be considered a national security priority, as diseases do not respect international boundaries, thus this work into capacity building and rapid response is a significant advantage. The impact of this Hub will be felt internationally, as the UK reaffirms its leadership in Global Health and works to ensure that the outputs of this Hub reach the most vulnerable, especially children.