The Advanced Research and Invention Agency has awarded a team led by Bali Pulendran, PhD, director of the Institute for Immunity, Transplantation and Infection, a four-and-a-half-year, approximately $18 million grant to develop a “universal vaccine” platform. The platform could protect against viruses, such as influenza and COVID-19, as well as bacteria that cause pneumonia and allergens ranging from pollen to dust mites.

ARIA, a research and development funding agency based in the United Kingdom, made the award through its Sustained Viral Resilience program. The goal of the program is to create a new class of medicines, called sustained innate immunoprophylactics, which provide enduring protection through the innate immune system – one of the two arms of the immune system that has been historically overlooked in vaccine development.

The award supports a collaboration between Stanford University and Imperial College London aimed at advancing a next-generation vaccine platform toward human testing. The multidisciplinary team includes Eric Appel, PhD, associate professor of materials science and engineering, together with collaborators at Imperial College London who will help advance manufacturing, regulatory and clinical translation efforts.

Pulendran and his fellow researchers will use the award to translate their intranasal universal vaccine platform – recently described in a Science paper in which the team demonstrated broad protection against diverse respiratory pathogens in preclinical studies – toward human studies, with the goal of assessing the vaccine’s capacity to induce safe and broadly protective immunity against diverse respiratory pathogens and allergens.

“We are looking to leverage the innate immune system, an incredibly broad system of defense, to create a new and transformative vaccine paradigm,” said Pulendran, the vaccine project’s principal investigator and the Violetta L. Horton Professor II.

The innate immune system responds rapidly to pathogen exposures, though only on the timescale of days. The adaptive immune system, the second immune system arm, then takes over, producing pathogen-specific T cells and antibodies that can last a lifetime. Nearly all vaccines target the adaptive immune system.

Natural mutations, however, can allow pathogens to evade the immune response, leaving patients vulnerable and forcing immunologists to develop new seasonal respiratory vaccines. The approach could also provide a first line of defense against newly emerging respiratory pathogens before pathogen-specific vaccines become available.