Wellcome Trust – Seeking predictors of vaccine efficacy

The Wellcome Trust has announced the Seeking Predictors of Vaccine Efficacy - Identifying Correlates of Protection to Support Vaccine Development call to support research teams to establish or validate correlates of protection across 11 diseases with the potential to cause substantial outbreaks or which have significant burden and have no licenced vaccines. The aim is to develop a range of reliable metrics to predict vaccine efficacy to support effective vaccine development, especially in low resource settings. This is a one-off funding call and is jointly funded by the Trust and the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI).

This call is divided into two strands, depending on the disease pathogens studied:

Part A for bacterial/parasitic diseases, or
Part B for viral-related diseases

Funding:       up to £ 3M

Duration:      up to 3 years

Eligibility: Eligible administering organisations can be: higher education institutions; research institutes; not-for-profit or government bodies; and for-profit organisations. The host organisation of the lead applicant can be based anywhere in the world.

The research team must:

• Be led or co-led by an applicant hosted at an institution in a country affected by one of the diseases in scope.
• Demonstrate transdisciplinary expertise in immunology, vaccinology, statistics and data analysis, and experience of pre-clinical (where relevant) and clinical vaccine development.
• Include at least one applicant with expertise in biomarker discovery or validation to inform clinical go/no-go decisions (or licensure applications).
• Show expertise in monitoring vaccine-induced immune responses.

• More information about the program is available here

• Find some writing tips for the Wellcome Trust here and a webinar on Wellcome Funding Platform here
• The application portal can be found here and the preliminary application here