Stanford Researchers Awarded $18 Million to Develop a Universal Vaccine

The Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA) has awarded a team at Stanford’s Institute for Immunity, Transplantation and Infection a four-and-a-half year, approximately $18 million grant to develop a universal vaccine platform that 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 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 Bali Pulendran, PhD, director of the Institute for Immunity, Transplantation and Infection, the vaccine project’s principal investigator and the Violetta L. Horton Professor II.