Vaccine Development Initiative gathers speed

The number of companies joining a Europe-wide initiative to accelerate Vaccine R&D timelines continues to rise, with Insilico Biotechnology AG Stuttgart) amongst the latest to join.

Inno4vac, which has received funding of more than €33 million from the Innovative Medicines Initiative 2 (IMI2), will be driven by the use of advanced predictive models and data science to enable faster development and manufacturing of novel vaccines, as the accelerated development programme around recent COVID vaccines demonstrated.

The initiative, due to start on Sept 1, 2021, and run until Feb 28, 2027, is being coordinated by the European Vaccine Initiative (Germany), with the support from the Sclavo Vaccines Association (Italy), for the scientific coordination, and involves 41 partners from 11 different European countries, including 37 academic institutions and SMEs, as well as GSK, Sanofi Pasteur, CureVac and Takeda as industry partners.

“The scientific community has recognised the urgent need to significantly reduce the time-to-market for new vaccines, as required by the continued advance of infectious diseases. Therefore, Insilico is excited to be part of the Inno4vac partnership and to work with renowned partners who will make use of Insilico's latest technology platform and modeling experience to accelerate the availability of new vaccines, ” said company CEO Klaus Mauch.

The company will be addressing four main areas in an integrated approach; the use of AI for in silico vaccine immune response and efficacy prediction; developing a computational platform for modelling vaccine bio-manufacturing and stability testing; establishing new human infection models of influenza, Respiratory Syncytial Virus (RSV) and Clostridium difficile for early vaccine efficacy evaluation; developing cell-based human in vitro models for immune protection predictability.

The company will also create and validate Digital Twins for cell cultivation as part of the scale-up solution process together with academic and industrial partners.

This project has received funding from the Innovative Medicines Initiative 2 Joint Undertaking under grant agreement No 101007799. This Joint Undertaking receives support from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme and EFPIA. The design of a sustainability plan will also be carried out by the project partners to ensure the long-term access to the project results, including models, beyond the duration of the Inno4vac project.

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