Launch of the Vaccine Development Toolkit

The MRC, BBSRC and Department of Health have launched a vaccine development process map  to show the key stages in vaccine development. The map was developed by the UK Vaccine R&D Network to facilitate understanding of the key stages in vaccine development and importantly, where bottlenecks could potentially delay progress.

The UK Vaccine R&D Network have also produced a summary of key points to guide decision making  in the context of an emergency response to an epidemic or pandemic and carried out case studies to highlight where bottlenecks in vaccine development occur in response to an outbreak. The toolkit also includes details case studies where three candidate vaccines were evaluated against the process map to verify if the bottlenecks identified were accurate.