Our vision is to save lives by accelerating the development and use of vaccines against bacterial infections relevant to low and middle income countries (LMICs).
Why do we need a bacterial vaccine network?
- Infections cause >20% of all deaths worldwide, and kill disproportionately in low and middle income countries
- Bacterial infections kill approx. five million people annually, with the antimicrobial resistance (AMR) crisis limiting further our options for controlling infections
- Vaccines save millions of lives yearly and are a cost-effective approach to prevent infectious disease and their devastating sequelae
- Vaccines work silently in the background, promoting the body’s ability to kill the pathogen before an infection is established
- Studying vaccines also allows us to study immune function in health and disease
BactiVac was established in August 2017 to help address this and is one of five vaccinology networks funded to support discrete areas of vaccine research.
What do we want to achieve?
- For many bacterial diseases, there is either no vaccine or the existing vaccine does not provide complete protection
- New vaccines against bacterial infections will help people worldwide, but most directly those in LMICs
- There are many barriers that limit vaccine development and implementation
- These barriers can be scientific, such as what antigens to target, or economic issues, such as neglect due to lack of commercial viability
BactiVac is an open, multidisciplinary network of experts helping to overcome barriers limiting the generation of new vaccines and their use where needed. To do this, we will continue to:
- Grow awareness of the need for bacterial vaccines and ensure we represent the interests of our members to a wide range of stakeholders
- Promote close interaction and collaboration between members and across disciplines, encouraging the dissemination of skills and best practice
- Help achieve this through subsidised network meetings, bringing key experts and opinion makers together to discuss recent advances
- Provide catalyst funding for projects and training to grow new directions and capacity, leading to further, larger grant funding