Grant fuels vaccine training program
USU received a $300,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) to fund a vaccine-manufacturing training program, said Kamal Rashid, associate director and research professor for the Center for Integrated Bio-Systems (CIB).
The program will specifically focus on improving production of influenza vaccines. Exceptional facilities and faculty at Utah State continue to make major advances in research that help set the university apart from others, Rashid said.
“The whole idea is how to be prepared in case of an outbreak of influenza,” Rashid said. “How do you be prepared? By having vaccines so when there is disease, you can vaccinate people. Prevention is always better than treatment.”
Rashid, along with Research Assistant Professor Bart Tarbet from the Institute for Antiviral Research, was recently awarded the grant and will work toward implementing the training program for members of various international scientific communities in developing countries.
The countries sending participants to USU for training include Egypt, India, Indonesia, Vietnam and Mexico. There are a total of 11 countries participating.
“The better the world is prepared to battle these diseases from spreading, the better for the U.S. also,” Rashid said.
The grant was awarded by the DHHS’s Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA). The money will help pay for travel expenses, lodging, meals and visas for the vaccine production teams from the 11 countries, Tarbet said.
The course will be taught at CIB’s cutting-edge facilities and last three weeks. He said the course will be highly intensive, starting with theory and science and then focusing on hands-on practice.
“We’re guessing they’ll send their best people,” Tarbet said. “This is just the first year and the first time it’s being offered. We’re hoping the word will spread and more people will be trained.”
He said when he first saw the opportunity to apply for the grant he thought USU would be a perfect candidate to host the program because of the curriculum and faculty already in place. If the training program is successful, the CIB stands to receive subsequent grants that could total over $2 million over a five year period.
Rashid said the announcement about the grant came in June, they wrote the proposal in July, BARDA visited the site in August, and they were notified in September that they got the award.
“Because we have the experience and we knew exactly what they wanted and we put it together in a short period of time,” Rashid said. CIB’s state-of-the-art facilities will help teach the program in a uniform way that should benefit all participants.
The people coming from the participating countries are members of an already established scientific and vaccine-manufacturing community, Tarbet said. Different developing countries have varying levels of technology and methods for vaccine manufacture.
Part of the overall program includes funding from the Gates Foundation and the World Health Organization (WHO) to help provide better technology in these countries.
Tarbet said he is the newest of six professors in the Institute for Antiviral Research. His work focuses on antiviral chemotherapy and animal models of infectious disease.
“We have an antiviral research group who has been doing animal vaccine production,” Rashid said. “When you combine the facilities and the research, you end up with a really nice place to teach these countries these techniques.”
He said the process will consist of basic techniques in animal cell culture, how to grow viruses safely, how to mass-produce and purify vaccines, and then how to do it in accordance with the Food and Drug Administration’s current standards.
Rashid was recruited to USU from Penn State in 2000 and is at the forefront of his field, according to a publication about USU’s biotechnology and bioprocessing training programs.
“Dr. Rashid’s longstanding presence in academic and industrial circles makes USU’s training program one of the leading programs of its kind,” the publication states.
Similar programs to the one the BARDA grant will facilitate have already been in effect on campus. Rashid said this is part of why he feels he, Tarbet and the rest of the “world-class speakers” in the program will be successful in helping scientists from other countries improve their methods of influenza vaccine production.
“The university is very interested in establishing international ties and international collaborations,” Tarbet said, “and this will definitely help with that.”
– dan.whitney.smith@aggiemail.usu.edu