Root Cause
Promising vaccine candidates targeting global health and epidemic preparedness vaccines are made in ways that do not support access, affordability or rapid scale-up.
Lassa fever is an acute viral illness endemic to many parts of West Africa, causing significant annual outbreaks. There are an estimated 300,000 to 500,000 cases and 5,000 related deaths each year. Despite this disease burden, which is believed to be significantly underestimated, no vaccine for Lassa fever is currently available.
Action
A partnership focused on global equitable access to vaccines has come together to solve this. Batavia Biosciences and the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative are developing a Lassa Fever Vaccine, funded by the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, with trials supported by the European Developing Countries Clinical Trial Partnership.
Batavia Biosciences successfully produced vaccine material for clinical trials, ensuring vaccines are made in a low-cost and rapidly scalable way by using Univercells’ innovative manufacturing technologies (i.e. the scale-X TM & NevoLine TM from Univercells Technologies’ product portfolio).
Impact
The use of our technology enables the production of high volumes of vaccine doses in a small footprint facility, dramatically reducing capital and operational costs. The technology is particularly well suited to produce global health and epidemic preparedness vaccines such as Lassa fever.
In line with CEPI’s goals, the partnership secured funding for a Phase IIb clinical trial that will provide crucial proof-of-concept efficacy data from populations located in regions prone to outbreaks of the potentially deadly disease.
This partnership also allowed vaccines manufactured with Univercells’ innovative technology to be part of a Phase 1 clinical trial study performed under a stringent regulatory authority.
