Jenner Institute: against COVID-19 ^Hub

Entity: Jenner Institute

Category: Hub

Description: The Jenner Institute is part of the Nuffield Department of medicine at Oxford University. It was founded in 2005 and aims to develop vaccines for diseases of major global importance such as malaria, tuberculosis and HIV. They also have a partnership with the Institute for Animal Health, where they develop vaccines for animal diseases such as foot & mouth disease. There are over 100 members of staff at the Jenner Institute, including PhD students, postdocs, research assistants, research nurses and clinical fellows. The work there covers all aspects of vaccine development from designing the vaccines to large scale manufacturing and clinical testing. In the last 3 years their molecular biology lab has generated over 160 new poxvirus and adenovirus vaccine vectors. The viruses are grown in tissue culture, then purified from the cells and tested for purity and stability. Vaccines used in clinical trials are manufactured under sterile conditions at the clinical biomanufacturing facility which is located on the Churchill Hospital site. Newly developed vaccines are given to healthy volunteers so they can check that they are safe and able to induce an immune response. Blood from the volunteers is taken to the laboratory where they look for immune responses to the vaccine using an ELISpot assay.

Project: Vaccine ChAdOx1 nCov-19

Summary: A vaccine candidate was developed by Jenner Institute which began trials in humans jointly with the University’s Oxford Vaccine Group. The University of Oxford’s ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 is an adenovirus vaccine vector. The university is testing the vaccine in a clinical trial planned to be conducted in the Thames Valley Region. The University of Oxford has also announced an agreement with the UK-based global biopharmaceutical company AstraZeneca for the further development, large-scale manufacture and potential distribution of the COVID-19 vaccine candidate currently being trialled by the University of Oxford. This will allow for rapid vaccination around the world if the COVID-19 vaccine candidate proves to be effective. It is the first partnership to be formed since the Government launched its dedicated Vaccines Taskforce to help find, test and deliver a new Coronavirus vaccine. It also comes alongside £20 million Government funding for Oxford University’s vaccine research and support for the institution’s clinical trials.

UK-based gene and cell therapy group Oxford Biomedica has become part of the consortium focussed on the development, scale-up and production of the Covid-19 coronavirus vaccine candidate. Led by Jenner Institute, University of Oxford, the consortium involves the Vaccines Manufacturing and Innovation Centre (VMIC), Cobra Biologics, Pall Life Sciences and Halix. Vaccine ChAdOx1 nCov-19, studied in a trial in the UK, will assess vaccine candidate’s safety and ability to induce an immune response against the novel coronavirus. The vaccine candidate is able to induce a strong immune response from one dose in preclinical and clinical trials to date.