£3.7 million grant to advance devices for detecting substandard and falsified vaccines
The three-year project builds on research that began during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic
The Vaccine Identity Evaluation Consortium, which includes researchers from the Department of Biochemistry and partner institutions, has been awarded a £3.7 million Medical Research Council (MRC) Developmental Pathway Funding Scheme (DPFS) grant to advance innovative technologies for detecting substandard and falsified vaccines.
During the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, concerns emerged that vaccine degradation and falsification could undermine global immunisation programmes. Researchers from the Department of Biochemistry, working with collaborators in the Nuffield Department of Medicine, the Department of Chemistry and the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, successfully demonstrated that existing analytical technologies could be repurposed to identify degraded and falsified vaccines within supply chains.
Professor Nicole Zitzmann
The research in the Department of Biochemistry was led by Professor Nicole Zitzmann, who has since retired. Previous studies carried out in Professor Zitzmann’s lab developed and evaluated several complementary approaches, including MALDI-TOF mass spectrometry, hospital biochemical analysers and simple glucose assays, to help identify compromised vaccines.
The project is now led in the department by Professor Weston Struwe. Members of the Biochemistry team include Dr Bevin Gangadharan, Dr Tehmina Bharucha and Dr Yohan Arman.
Members of the Department of Biochemistry working on the new MRC-funded project. From left to right: Weston Struwe, Bevin Gangadharan, Tehmina Bharucha and Yohan Arman.
The new grant significantly expands the international collaboration, bringing together partners from the Nigerian National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control (NAFDAC), Obafemi Awolowo University in Nigeria, Oxford's Department of Engineering Science, the UK Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), the University of East London, and the Mahidol Oxford Tropical Medicine Research Unit (MORU) in Thailand.
Over the next three years, the consortium will further develop and rigorously evaluate the screening devices before undertaking near real-world field evaluations in Nigeria. The project will also assess the technologies' cost-effectiveness and potential for deployment within vaccine supply chains, with the aim of strengthening quality assurance and helping to protect vaccination programmes against substandard and falsified products.
