Influenza and Respiratory Diseases
Over 1 million people are hospitalized with respiratory disease in the US each year. Influenza’s ability to change each year as well as its multiple animal reservoirs result in the emergence of new pathogenic strains, necessitating the need for regularly updated vaccines. Over the past few decades, CVD is an established leader in respiratory vaccine development and evaluation. As part of our portfolio, we evaluate universal flu vaccines designed to provide broad protection against many flu viruses, which could ultimately obviate the need for annual influenza vaccination. Additionally, the Center remains at the forefront of developing and employing controlled human infection models as an alternative to traditional broad-based vaccine efficacy studies, which are both more costly and time-consuming. Building upon our strong foundation of influenza research, CVD performs challenge studies and develops and tests vaccines for a variety of respiratory viruses.
Disease Areas: Bordetella pertussis (whooping cough), Haemophilus parainfluenzae, influenza virus (seasonal and avian strains), pneumococcus, respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), SARS-CoV-2, seasonal coronaviruses
Major programs and initiatives:
- Collaborative Influenza Vaccine Innovation Center (CIVICs) program
- Vaccine Treatment and Evaluation Unit
- Influenza and coronavirus controlled human infections
- Universal flu vaccine evaluation
- Next-generation flu vaccine evaluation
- Next-generation COVID-19 vaccine evaluation
- Agnostic upper respiratory virus prevention