Summary:
With the recent success of adenoviral vaccines against Ebola and SARS-CoV-2, the potential of this platform in the fight against outbreak pathogens is being realized for human infectious diseases. This technology is suitable for large scale manufacture and relatively low cost. The potential of viral-vectors to induce T Helper type 1 and high antibody responses makes the use of this approach attractive in efforts to combat the disease and disability caused by viral pathogens. However, the case for their use in bacterial vaccines is less clear: the expression of a bacterial protein in a eukaryotic cell may impact on the antigen localization, induce unwanted glycosylation or affect protein conformation, and this is also true if using the mRNA vaccine platform. The potential and challenges of adenoviral vectors was explored against two bacterial diseases. While our work highlights the challenges inherent in developing novel vaccines using this technology and can be applied to mRNA, the successful progression of two novel bacterial vaccines to clinical development underlines the potential of these platforms for vaccine development against bacterial diseases, and their potential for veterinary use.

Biography:
I graduated in biochemistry and obtained a PhD at the University of Lyon, France in 2000. I worked on the pre-clinical development and evaluation of gene-based vaccines against different infectious diseases, first at the Institut National de la Sante et Recherche Medicale (INSERM) in France, and then at the Biomedical Primate Research Center, The Netherlands. In 2007 I joined the Jenner Institute at the University of Oxford and in 2010 moved to the Oxford Vaccine Group where I became Associate Professor in Vaccinology, to explore and realise the potential of the adenoviral-vectored platform to induce protective antibody responses against bacterial diseases such as group B meningococcus and the plague. In 2021 I joined the University of Surrey where I am Professor of Vaccinology and Head of School of Biosciences, and my research aims to expand the use of gene-based vaccine platforms against infections relevant to OneHealth.