The Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations has awarded a team led by Peter Kim, PhD, the Virginia and D.K. Ludwig Professor in Biochemistry, a four-year, $18 million grant to develop vaccines that could offer broad protection from filoviruses, a family of viruses that includes the highly fatal Ebola and Marburg.
CEPI, based in Oslo, Norway, is an international organization with the goal of accelerating the development of vaccines and other biologic countermeasures against epidemic or pandemic threats.
Kim and his fellow researchers will use the award to design and test new vaccine candidates that could provide all-in-one protection against currently known filoviruses as well as those that are limited to nonhuman hosts but could jump from animals to humans.
“We aim to create a single, broad-spectrum vaccine that will protect against three viruses causing frequent outbreaks in Africa — Zaire Ebola virus, Sudan Ebola virus and Marburg virus — which, collectively, have an average fatality rate of around 50%,” said Kim, the project’s principal investigator.
The researchers will use artificial intelligence to design immunogens — the substances in a vaccine that provoke an immune response — that, they hope, will protect against more than one filovirus. These immunogens will be presented on a ferritin-based protein-nanoparticle framework to create a range of candidates that will be tested in laboratory and animal studies. The researchers will rapidly advance the most promising vaccine candidate to the point where it is ready to quickly enter clinical trials should an unknown filovirus outbreak emerge.
The ferritin nanoparticle-based vaccine is favorable for use in low- and middle-income countries as it does not require frozen storage, which can limit access in low-resource settings. It has already been tested in Phase I clinical trials for influenza and COVID-19 vaccines, which were shown to be safe.
“Our goal is to make the vaccine stable enough that it will maintain stability without requiring freezer storage and that it will be inexpensive to manufacture,” Kim said.
