Vaccine manufacturing is stuck in the past, and this hub aims to drag it into the modern era. The problem is stark: vaccines exist for many childhood killers, yet 6 million children still die before age five each year because manufacturing is too slow, too expensive, and too fragile to reach them. The UK excels at discovering new vaccines but then has to send them abroad to be made at scale—a gap this hub intends to close. The hub will develop generic tools that work across many vaccine types, not just one. That includes devices that predict whether a lab-scale vaccine can be mass-produced before money is wasted, cheaper purification systems, genetic tweaks to boost yields, and heat-stable formulations that survive hot supply chains without refrigeration. A second research stream will map the economics of vaccine distribution to identify where costs pile up, then steer research toward cutting those bottlenecks. If it succeeds, the UK becomes an end-to-end vaccine powerhouse—discovery, development, and manufacture all in one place. That means faster responses to future pandemics, cheaper vaccines for the NHS, and a realistic chance of getting life-saving shots to the children who currently miss them.
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Vaccines are the most successful public health initiative of the 20th century. They save millions of lives annually, add billions to the global economy and extended life expectancy by an average of 30 years. Even so, the UN estimates that globally 6 million children each year die before their 5th birthday. While vaccines do exist to prevent these deaths, it is limitations in manufacturing capacity, technology, costs and logistics that prevent us for reaching the most vulnerable. The UK is a world leader in vaccine research and has played a significant leadership role in several public health emergencies, most notably the Swine Flu pandemic in 2009 and the recent Ebola outbreak in West Africa. While major investment has been made into early vaccine discovery - this has not been matched in the manufacturing sciences or capacity. Consequently, leading UK scientists are forced to turn overseas to commercialise their products. Therefore, this investment into The Future Vaccine Manufacturing Hub will enable our vision to make the UK the global centre for vaccine discovery, development and manufacture. We will create a vaccine manufacturing hub that brings together a world-class multidisciplinary team with decades of cumulative experience in all aspects of vaccine design and manufacturing research. This Hub will bring academia, industry and policy makers together to propose radical change in vaccine development and manufacturing technologies, such that the outputs are suitable for Low and Middle Income Countries. The vaccine manufacturing challenges faced by the industry are to (i) decrease time to market, (ii) guarantee long lasting supply - especially of older, legacy vaccine, (iii) reduce the risk of failure in moving between different vaccine types, scales of manufacture and locations, (iv) mitigating costs and (v) responding to threats and future epidemics or pandemics. This work is further complicated as there is no generic vaccine type or manufacturing approach suitable for all diseases and scenarios. Therefore this manufacturing Hub will research generic tools and technologies that are widely applicable to a range of existing and future vaccines. The work will focus on two main research themes (A) Tools and Technologies to de-risk scale-up and enable rapid response, and (B) Economic and Operational Tools for uninterrupted, low cost supply of vaccines. The first research theme seeks to create devices that can predict if a vaccine can be scaled-up for commercial manufacture before committing resources for development. It will include funds to study highly efficient purification systems, to drive costs down and use genetic tools to increase vaccine titres. Work in novel thermo-stable formulations will minimise vaccine wastage and ensure that vaccines survive the distribution chain. The second research theme will aim to demystify the economics of vaccine development and distribution and allow the identification of critical cost bottlenecks to drive research priorities. It will also assess the impact of the advances made in the first research theme to ensure that the final cost of the vaccine is suitable for the developing world. The Hub will be a boon for the UK, as this research into generic tools and technologies will be applicable for medical products intended for the UK and ensure that prices remain accessible for the NHS. It will establish the UK as the international centre for end-to-end vaccine research and manufacture. Additionally, vaccines should be considered a national security priority, as diseases do not respect international boundaries, thus this work into capacity building and rapid response is a significant advantage. The impact of this Hub will be felt internationally, as the UK reaffirms its leadership in Global Health and works to ensure that the outputs of this Hub reach the most vulnerable, especially children.
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