Call for Selection New Potential Consortium Members to Enter into TRANSVAC Infrastructure

Background and General Information

This call for applications has been issued by the TRANSVAC Management Team, European Vaccine Initiative (EVI), on behalf of the TRANSVAC Project Partners.

1.1.1.  Background

Despite the historical significant expertise in vaccine Research and Development (R&D) in Europe, there is currently a strong need to improve cooperative efforts between R&D groups and vaccine producers across Europe to develop the innovative vaccines of the future. At present, any academic group or SME who develops a new experimental vaccine needs to individually locate and approach a fragmented and non-harmonised group of vaccine development service providers. Moreover, the next generation of vaccines require unprecedented innovative breakthroughs which are more likely to occur in an environment in which state-of-the-art technologies, knowledge and training is available and accessible.

The TRANSVAC project has emerged as the joint vaccine research infrastructure of leading European groups working in vaccine development, and is coordinated by EVI. TRANSVAC is a four-year collaborative infrastructure project funded with 9.9 million Euros under the European Commission’s (EC) Seventh Framework Programme (FP7). The TRANSVAC project aims to accelerate the development of promising vaccine candidates by bridging part of the gap between academic research and clinical trials. In order to reach this goal, TRANSVAC is currently offering, through a rolling call, a complimentary set of coordinated vaccine research and development services and expertise to external groups. TRANSVAC is providing researchers (or research groups) with access to:

• Adjuvant formulation for antigens
• Animal models for preclinical evaluation
• Global analyses / biomarker platform: microarray analysis, deep sequencing
• Assay reagent formulation and filling

In 2011 during the first three TRANSVAC calls, eleven projects have been awarded. Please click here for an overview of the services and selected users

Finally, TRANSVAC is committed to foster vaccine R&D in Europe beyond the duration of TRANSVAC. To this end, a series of European Vaccine Stakeholders Workshops are organised. From these meetings, dedicated working groups will be formed who will develop a roadmap for sustainable vaccine R&D in Europe and explore the genesis of a European Vaccine Development Infrastructure. The first workshop has been held in October 2011 and two remaining meetings will be held in 2012-2013