World Vaccine Congress highlights IAVI’s R&D from end to end

IAVI’s leaders are excited to participate in the World Vaccine Congress 2024, taking place April 2-4 in Washington, D.C. The conference convenes over 4,000 attendees to hear from hundreds of speakers addressing some of the most exciting opportunities and challenges of vaccine development. The conference agenda covers the end-to-end development of vaccines, from discovery to manufacturing and global access considerations.

This year, Shelly Malhotra, vice president of global access and external affairs, will moderate the conference’s kick-off session, “Public-private collaboration for accessible infectious disease monoclonal antibodies in low- and middle- income countries.” This session, which takes place April 2 at 10 a.m. ET, will feature moderators and speakers from Medicines Patent Pool, UNITAID, the WHO, Instituto Butantan, Merck, Wellcome Trust, Samsung Bioepis, AstraZeneca, and the Vanderbilt Vaccine Center. The discussion will focus on the Viable business models, commercial incentives, and pathways to afford access to monoclonal antibodies for the highest burden populations that could benefit.

Concurrently on April 3 at 9 a.m. ET, IAVI leaders will provide opening remarks for two different conference tracks. Jon Heinrichs, vice president for antibody program strategy and translational immunology, will open the influenza and respiratory vaccines track. Heinrichs will focus on recent advances in vaccines and monoclonal antibodies that have provided the first meaningful opportunities to mitigate and prevent the devastating impacts of respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) in infants and older adults. He will touch on the combination of tools now available to prevent the feared “tripledemic” of COVID-19, flu, and RSV. Marion Gruber, vice president, public health and regulatory science, will open remarks the emerging and re-emerging diseases track. Her remarks will set the stage for discussions around vaccines for Chikungunya, Ebola, mpox, and smallpox, as well as outbreak response capacity and using AI for global epidemic intelligence.

Later that morning, Swati Gupta, vice president and head of emerging infectious diseases (EID) and epidemiology, will deliver a talk on “developing novel partnership models for vaccines in EID” under the vaccine partnerships track on April 3 at 10:10 a.m. ET. Gupta’s remarks will focus on prioritizing pathogens where there is no clear vaccine market – a challenge underlying IAVI’s own end-to-end vaccine development model for Marburg, Ebola Sudan, and Lassa viruses. No vaccines are currently available for any of these pathogens, which continue to cause outbreaks amongst communities in LMICs and are potential bioweapons.

Mark your calendars for these exciting sessions at the World Vaccine Congress 2024 and stay tuned to IAVI’s LinkedIn and Instagram for updates!