The talk will be about ways we are trying to address the increasing risk posed to public health by falsified vaccines. Currently there is no global infrastructure in place to monitor supply chains using screening methods that can identify fake vaccines. The multidisciplinary Vaccine Identity Evaluation (VIE) consortium brought together diverse scientists with medicine regulatory authorities, international organisations, device and vaccine manufacturers and other stakeholders, to repurpose existing technologies as well as develop novel techniques to protect the global vaccine supply. I will showcase some of our approaches presenting recent data.
Nicole Zitzmann is Professor of Virology at the University of Oxford, where she is a Principal Investigator and Associate Head of Department in the Department of Biochemistry, and PI in the Kavli Institute for NanoScience Discovery. Her work focuses on developing broad-spectrum antiviral drugs for pandemic preparedness, and the development of proteomics methods for non-invasive diagnosis and understanding of disease. She is a member of the VIE consortium, where her group focuses on the use of mass spectrometry and the development of several low-cost techniques to detect falsified and substandard vaccines and other liquid medicines.