Better vaccines are goal of this local researcher. His institute just got more funding
A medical research institute with local ties has been awarded a new round of funding in its work to improve vaccines, specifically through an ingredient included in each dose.
Dr. Christopher Fox of Sumner is the senior vice president of formulations for the Access to Advanced Health Institute in Seattle. The News Tribune interviewed Fox in March 2023 about the institute’s progress in developing a new tuberculosis vaccine.
TB claimed the lives of 1.3 million people in 2022, according to the World Health Organization, and remains the second leading infectious killer worldwide after COVID-19.
AAHI’s TB vaccine is in the second of three phases of clinical trials, Fox told The News Tribune on Wednesday. He is principal investigator of the contract awarded by the National Institutes of Health, which funded the trial.
In a separate project, AAHI will receive up to $12.7 million in grant funding to develop a new vaccine formulation for improved protection against TB and pandemic influenza.
Pandemic influenza is defined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as a global outbreak of a new flu virus, as opposed to the COVID-19 pandemic that erupted from a novel coronavirus.
Specifically, the research will go into developing “a novel immune-stimulating adjuvant formulation that will improve the human immune response to vaccines, providing broader and longer lasting protection against disease,” according to a news release from the institute.
“An adjuvant is really any substance that’s added to a vaccine to increase the immune response or improve the quality of the immune response,” Fox explained. “And so what this new project is focused on is developing, really, a class of next-generation adjuvants that are better at what they’re designed to do.”
The grant comes from a division of the U.S. Department of Defense. The project is through the Medical Defense Consortium.
“The idea is that with new and improved vaccines they can benefit many different populations, whether it be for defense purposes or for global health,” he said.
“We think there’s there’s quite a bit of room for improvement,” Fox added. “And so what we are being funded to do now is to really take this class of adjuvants to the next level. And by that, I mean, turning them into adjuvants that are more rationally designed, that have a better manufacturing process. And that can really do a better job at at improving the quality and strength of immune responses.”
Those types of improvements could boost length of protection time between vaccines, he noted, “so that you don’t have to get a shot every three or six months or whatever it is.”
AAHI also is working to improve “vaccine stability,” such as its temperature-stable TB vaccine, which is in trials now. That research seeks to keep vaccines from failing due to exposure of temperature extremes in shipment.
“One of the things that a lot of people don’t know is that many vaccines are accidentally frozen during transit,” he explained. “And for some vaccines, that’s OK. Like the the COVID RNA vaccines — they’re designed to be frozen.”
But for other vaccines that are supposed to be kept merely refrigerated, “when they’re frozen accidentally ... they have to be thrown away.”
Fox said one study estimated the temperature-driven loss could be as high as 40 percent.
“One of the things we’re working on in this new effort is to develop adjuvants that can withstand freezing, as well as elevated temperatures,” he said. “You don’t want it to get too hot or too cold with current vaccines. But if we can make formulations that can withstand those temperature extremes, there will be less vaccine waste, and we’ll be able to get the vaccines to harder-to-reach areas in the world.”
Politics and funding
AAHI’s work comes amid the heightened political arguments over vaccines, which surged during the pandemic and are emerging again in the current campaign cycle and in states such as Florida, where a measles outbreak is making headlines.
“It’s unfortunate to see these kinds of topics be politicized,” Fox said when asked about his concerns over current political turmoil and pushback among some to the COVID-19 vaccine.
“Generally speaking, vaccines, I would say next to clean water, have saved more lives than any other intervention in the history of the world,” Fox said. “So I don’t think that you can really overestimate the beneficial impact of vaccines.”
He said vaccines might be a victim of their own successes, with the distance of time from when diseases claimed the lives of vast swaths of population.
“Many, many people now have no concept or experience with having someone suffer from measles, or from pertussis, or from diphtheria,” he said. “These are terrible diseases. If you have a very young child that’s suffering from pertussis and struggling to breathe, you no longer need to be convinced ... how important a vaccine is.”
“Unfortunately, I think as people see these diseases come back, it’s going to be a shock to them, and I think it’ll make them reconsider their views on whether vaccines are necessary.”
Casey Benadof, media representative for AAHI, added to Fox’s remarks regarding the current political climate and vaccines in a statement sent to The News Tribune following Wednesday’s interview.
Benadof wrote that “we believe now is actually the moment to double down on funding more reliable and sustainable vaccine development infrastructure that will allow the industry to develop more accessible solutions at a fraction of the cost of Operation Warp Speed in the face of a public health emergency.”
Operation Warp Speed was a public-private partnership initiative implemented by the U.S. government to fast-track vaccine development, therapeutics and testing for COVID-19 during the pandemic.
Benadof added that AAHI is “working with our partners to advocate for the establishment of a network of Centers of Excellence for vaccine innovation and development.”
This story was originally published March 7, 2024 at 7:00 AM.
