Pre-announcement: Engineer next generation veterinary vaccine technology platforms

Through this programme, Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) and Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) aims to deliver a strategic research programme that will catalyse the UK research and innovation community to use multidisciplinary approaches to engineer next generation veterinary vaccine technology platforms. It will lead to forming a ‘plug and play’ modular design to enable rapid response and large-scale manufacturing associated with a smaller footprint, lower cost, and easier deployment.

The scope of the programme will target areas within the pipeline of platform technologies, from antigen discovery and delivery through to immunological understanding with focus on addressing key unmet needs in veterinary vaccine research and innovation. See the Global Veterinary Vaccinology Research and Innovation Landscape Survey Report | STAR-IDAZ on the STAR-IDAZ website.

This programme will focus on transformative technologies that will offer mechanisms to engineer next generation veterinary vaccines through ‘de novo’ platforms or modifying existing platforms. To enable a step change in the field of veterinary vaccinology, a systematic and comparative evaluation of platforms is required. A greater understanding is needed of the platform, administration route, pathogen type and the species-specific protective immunity differences relating to vaccine technology platforms and the efficacy of potential products. Such an analysis could include, but not limited to the:

• functionality of the platforms across species
• administration routes, for example, mucosal or intramuscular
• choice of pathogens
• species-specific differences in protective efficacy of the platforms and how these induce different immune responses for effective implementation
• systematic evaluation of vaccine efficacy and safety across species and pathogen

The research funded through this programme is to develop vaccines for livestock and aquaculture and to tackle antimicrobial resistance (AMR). The scope of the programme is disease agnostic.