Preventing and Treating Disease
During the next decade, cancers are projected to cause more deaths than all infectious diseases combined. The Human Vaccines Project is seeking to bring the power of vaccination to the cancer space to address one of our greatest health threats.
Recent groundbreaking research has shown that the immune system plays a critical role in controlling cancer, and cancer vaccines and immunotherapies have the potential to revolutionize how we fight cancer. Yet even the best immune-driven therapies only work in a subset of patients and in a subset of cancers.
Understanding the key principles of human immunity can help expand the benefits of cancer vaccines and immunotherapies to a large number patients and cancers.
From diseases such as Zika and Ebola to pandemic influenza, emerging pandemics can spread globally much faster than our ability to develop new vaccines. In the future, new highly complex and devastating diseases may arise, just as HIV arose more than 35 years ago and still remains a global killer. The Human Vaccines Project is seeking to enable the rapid, targeted and effective development of vaccines to better fight future pandemics.
Global Infectious Diseases
HIV, malaria, TB and other diseases continue to cause millions of infections and deaths annually, and have resisted our best efforts to develop widely effective vaccines. The Human Vaccines Project can accelerate the development of critical new vaccines and therapeutics against these and other complex and devastating diseases.
Protecting All People
For the past 100 years, most vaccines have been designed for healthy adults in high income countries. Yet most of the global disease burden now occurs in the world’s fastest growing demographics, the elderly and those in the developing world.
We know that as people age, the immune system’s ability to fight disease declines, and we know that those developing countries have different and often poorer immune responses to vaccination than those in the high income regions.
By understanding how human immunity varies by demographics, the Project seeks to transform the effectiveness of existing and future vaccines by enabling them to be engineered for populations most at risk for disease.
Accelerating Product Development
An understanding of the key principles and components of the immune system will transform how vaccines and new therapies are developed, enabling greater predictability and rationality in how products are designed, reducing the risk, time and cost of development.