Completed Infection & Immunity Public Health & Healthcare

A strategic vision to drive the control of enteric fever through vaccination

Funder Wellcome Charity-funded
Associated organisations University of Oxford · Wellcome Sanger Institute Europe PMC affiliations are not treated as award recipients or mapped locations.
Funding £4.1M
Period Mar 2015 — Sept 2021

In plain English

AI plain-English summary

Typhoid and paratyphoid fever—bacterial infections spread through contaminated food and water—sicken millions of people each year in Africa and Asia, and antibiotic resistance is making them harder to treat. This programme aims to provide the hard data needed to roll out new, more effective conjugate vaccines in countries where they could have the biggest impact. The problem is that decision-makers lack reliable information on how many people actually get sick, which strains are circulating, and how well the vaccines work outside of controlled trials. This project will fill those gaps by combining large-scale epidemiological surveys in Nepal, Bangladesh, and Malawi with controlled human infection studies in the UK. Researchers will also investigate why some people are more susceptible than others, and develop better diagnostic tests to accurately measure disease burden and vaccine impact. If successful, the work could give governments and global health agencies the evidence they need to introduce typhoid conjugate vaccines into routine immunisation programmes. That would directly reduce illness and death from enteric fever, slow the spread of drug-resistant strains, and strengthen local research capacity in the regions that need it most.

View original technical description
The overall aim of this strategic award is to provide the science to underpin the implementation of new vaccines for the control of enteric fever, uniquely, in different epidemiological settings in Africa and Asia. The vision described here will: Provide missing data on disease burden, antibiotic resistance and transmission needed to support and implement conjugate vaccines for enteric fever, using epidemiological data collection and application of knowledge from (para)typhoid human challenge models. Establish the host factors that determine susceptibility to enteric fever to inform vaccine implementation strategies. Provide a comprehensive approach to diagnostics to allow a more accurate assessment of disease burden, vaccine impact and to inform epidemiological models. Investigate the mechanisms of natural and vaccine-induced protection in human challenge models (UK), test in human-to-mouse studies, and validate in field settings (Nepal, Bangladesh and Malawi) and to develop correlates of protection for use in driving vaccine implementation. Model disease dynamics and the balance between direct and indirect vaccine impact in different settings using the biological and epidemiological data emerging from the programme Strengthen research capacity in enteric fever endemic regions of the world and provide the data for vaccine implementation advocacy.

View the original record at the funder ↗

Researchers

Andrew Pollard (EPMC Awardee)Gordon Dougan (EPMC Awardee)

Related Research

Grants with similar aims, by meaning.

Accelerating the clinical development of a novel typhoid-paratyphoid bivalent conjugate vaccine – (VaxPaT)
An effective vaccination programme for the eradication of foot-and-mouth disease from India
Correlate of Protection against Paratyphoid (CoP-PT)
US-UK Collab: Adaptive surveillance and control for the elimination of endemic disease
NIHR Global Health Research Group on Gastrointestinal Infections: Facilitating the Introduction and Evaluation of Vaccines for Enteric Diseases in Children in Eastern and Southern sub-Saharan Africa

Original classification

Strategic Award - Science

Plain English summaries and category classifications on this site are generated by AI and may not perfectly reflect the original research.