The charity fund of Bill and Melinda Gates announced a project competition on developing a universal vaccine against different strains of influenza virus, Naked Science edition reports.
The future vaccine should regulate both seasonal morbidity and possible pandemic influenza. The competition organizers consider that the joint work of specialists from different fields (computing and systems biology, virusology, immunology, development of artificial intelligence) can obtain the most promising results. One of the prime goals of the competition is the search for non-standard approaches to creating new vaccines. The preference will be given to the approaches, which will help obtain relatively inexpensive and “long-playing” pharmaceuticals, which preserve effectiveness for minimum three years in a row – currently, new vaccines against seasonal epidemics are developed almost every year.
The most promising projects (there may be several of them) will receive from 250 thousand to two million dollars for pilot studies. If the work yields significant scientific results, which will be proved, for example, in animal studies, the project authors will obtain a major grant, amounting to 10 million dollars. Its scientists will be able to spend it on the clinical studies of pharmaceuticals with involvement of the large groups of patients. The organizers expect that the first clinical studies of new vaccines can start in 2021.
