Southampton joins pan-EU initiative to develop whooping cough vaccine

Researchers from the University, in partnership with an international consortium of experts from academia and industry, have won major European funding to accelerate the development of novel vaccines against pertussis (whooping cough).

The project, known as PERISCOPE – PERtussIS COrrelates of Protection Europe – sets out to study and improve vaccines and vaccination strategies for pertussis. The project has a total budget of €28M over the next five years from the Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI), a joint undertaking of the European Commission and the European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations (EFPIA).

PERISCOPE is also the first IMI project to receive funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

In the frame of this ambitious project, Professor Robert Read, Professor of Infectious Diseases and Head of Clinical and Experimental Sciences within the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Southampton, has been awarded €2,726,093 to develop a method to perform safe deliberate infection of human volunteers in order to test new vaccines and understand how they work.

Professor Read said: “I’m very pleased that our consortium has been granted this support in a programme which brings together world-leading clinical, immunological and microbiological expertise on pertussis to tackle this pressing issue, which affects around 16 million people worldwide each year. The work that we will do in Southampton will be first-in-man, and truly cutting edge science.”

PERISCOPE assembles a multi-national team of leading experts from 22 partnering institutions across 11 countries with long-standing experience in pertussis research, clinical trials, bioinformatics, immunology and public health. The consortium also includes Sanofi Pasteur and GlaxoSmithKline, two of the world’s largest and most experienced vaccine manufacturers, as industrial partners.