The Future Vaccine Manufacturing Research Hub (Vax-Hub)

疫苗是20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，为全球经济贡献数十亿美元，并将预期寿命平均延长30年。即便如此，据联合国估计，全球每年仍有600万儿童在5岁生日前死亡。虽然确实存在预防这些死亡的疫苗，但制造能力、技术、成本和物流方面的限制使我们无法接触到最脆弱的人群。英国在疫苗研究方面处于世界领先地位，并在几次公共卫生紧急事件中发挥了重要的领导作用，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病毒。虽然在早期疫苗发现方面进行了大量投资，但在制造科学或能力方面却没有相应的投资。因此，领先的英国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实现我们的愿景，使英国成为全球疫苗发现、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数十年的经验。该中心将把学术界、工业界和决策者聚集在一起，提出疫苗开发和制造技术的根本变革，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——特别是老旧的遗留疫苗；（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流行病。由于没有适用于所有疾病和情况的通用疫苗类型或生产方法，这项工作更加复杂。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。这项工作将侧重于两个主要研究主题(A)消除风险扩大和实现快速反应的工具和技术，以及(B)不间断、低成本供应疫苗的经济和业务工具。第一个研究主题寻求创造一种设备，可以在投入开发资源之前预测一种疫苗是否可以扩大规模用于商业生产。它将包括研究高效净化系统的资金，以降低成本，并使用遗传工具来增加疫苗滴度。研制新型热稳定制剂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发经济学的神秘面纱，并允许确定关键的成本瓶颈，以推动研究重点。它还将评估在第一个研究主题中取得的进展的影响，以确保疫苗的最终成本适合发展中国家。该中心对英国来说将是一个福音，因为这项对通用工具和技术的研究将适用于针对英国的医疗产品，并确保NHS的价格仍然可以获得。它将使英国成为端到端疫苗研究和生产的国际中心。此外，疫苗应被视为国家安全的优先事项，因为疾病不受国际边界的限制，因此开展能力建设和快速反应方面的工作具有重大优势。由于联合王国重申其在全球卫生领域的领导地位，并努力确保该中心的产出惠及最弱势群体，特别是儿童，因此将在国际上感受到该中心的影响。

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.