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VIDO research into vaccines for newborns offered funding by the Grand Challenges in Global Health initiative

The Grand Challenges in Global Health initiative has offered a grant of $5.6 million US to the University of Saskatchewan's Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization (VIDO) to develop and improve vaccines for newborns.

Competing with approximately 1,500 teams from 75 countries, VIDO - undertaking one of three Canadian Grand Challenges projects - has been offered funding for five years to develop technologies to make existing and new vaccines suitable for delivery to newborns.

"Very young animals and humans are highly vulnerable to infectious diseases, but few vaccines are effective in newborn or very young children or animals," says Dr. Lorne Babiuk, VIDO director and principal investigator for the project. "Our team of researchers from across Canada and abroad hopes to eliminate both the need for booster immunizations and for needles, while creating vaccines that protect newborns."

VIDO is developing adjuvants - substances that enhance the immune response to a vaccine - for existing vaccines in order to improve their effectiveness. A focus will be the creation of immunity at mucosal surfaces of the respiratory tract, which is where nearly all disease-causing organisms enter the body.

"The truly exciting element of this technology is that it can be applied to numerous vaccines in a number of species," says Babiuk, noting there are significant losses due to infectious disease in animals too young to be immunized effectively.

The project builds on a neonatal immunization research program already well underway at VIDO led by Dr. Volker Gerdts, scientific manager of the Grand Challenge project. Diseases under study through that program include Escherichia coli infections in young pigs and whooping cough (pertussis) in humans. VIDO scientist and Grand Challenge team member Dr. Sylvia van den Hurk is working to protect calves from respiratory syncytial virus and rotavirus.

Over the course of the Grand Challenge project, the team will seek to learn more about how the immune system of newborns works and how immune responses in the newborn can effectively be induced after a single immunization. The team will investigate the role of antibodies received from the mother and possible ways of overcoming interference from them.

Collaborators on the project include Dalhousie University (Halifax, N.S.), the University of British Columbia Centre for Microbial Diseases and Immunity Research (Vancouver, B.C.), and the International Vaccine Institute (Korea).

The intent of the Grand Challenges initiative is to support international partnerships in research targeted at improving protection from infectious diseases in the developing world. The initiative is supported by a $450 million US commitment from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, as well as two new funding commitments: $27.1 million from the Wellcome Trust, and $4.5 million from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research.

VIDO is a world leader in research and development and commercialization of vaccines and novel formulation and delivery systems for livestock and human diseases.

Credited with five "world firsts," VIDO is a financially self-reliant, non-profit organization owned by the University of Saskatchewan and operates with substantial support from the governments of Alberta and Saskatchewan as well as Government of Canada and industry competitive grants. It collaborates extensively with external institutes and companies and provides a rich training environment. VIDO is the lead proponent of the International Vaccine Centre, a $76-million biosafety Level 3 containment facility to be built on the University of Saskatchewan campus by 2009.

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