The potential of skin vaccination for pandemic preparedness  

We recently interviewed Professor Pierre Van Damme from the Centre for the Evaluation of Vaccination (CEV) and Vaccinopolis in Antwerp, Belgium.  

Our discussion focused on the potential of skin vaccination as a method to improve vaccine uptake especially during outbreaks and pandemics. We also touched on CEPI’s 2022-2026 strategy, which aims to prevent and prepare for future health emergencies.  

Here are some of the questions asked and our key takeaway messages:   

Vaccine supply chain and supply shortages are a relevant challenge during health outbreaks.  Can you explain how this issue could be addressed in future pandemics? 

If you really want to develop a vaccine and invest in prevention you need to do it for all the population globally and immediately we have seen with the previous pandemics that producing enough antigen and enough vaccine for the whole population is a challenge and that we have to look for alternatives where this is possible or we have to prepare much more production facilities in the different continents in the world which is not evident or we have to find other ways to trigger the immunity of the population with less antigen. 

I think that nicely taps into also Cepi’s Mission and I’m thinking about the 100-day mission that they are putting forward where they’re really looking into new vaccines, but also coming up with better solution for existing vaccines and potential new threats that might be upcoming.   

How do you think that clinical research might be of importance here and in future settings? 

Well, you can look at the pre-pandemic situation or the interpandemic situation where you can use a time to do more research on improving vaccines, existing vaccines, in terms of looking for alternative ways of administration, looking for the addition of all kind of adjuvants and how safe these adjuvants are. 

So, this is something you really can do in advance and set up placebo control trials or comparative trials to show whether the alternatives really have the same kind of results in terms of immunogenicity, safety and long-term efficacy. 

Also, you need to be very quick and to adapt your vaccines to have a technology where adaptation is possible, and where you can respond rather quickly to all these changes and that will be really the challenge of the future. 

Routes of administration might also be a very important part of vaccine research and potential outputs. For example, skin vaccination seems to be a promising route of administration. Can you share more about this? 

We know through skin vaccination that you can reduce the quantity of antigen. So, with what you’re producing, you can vaccinate much more people, which means that if you at the beginning of a pandemic you have a shortage of antigen, even though you can cover a larger part of the population with what you’re producing. 

So, having that alternative of skin immunization or skin vaccination is for sure something that needs to be further looked at, further developed and to be considered as an important element in pandemic preparedness. 

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Skin vaccination has been gaining increased interest. VAX-ID can overcome the many challenges seen with other techniques. It offers a reliable solution for vaccination campaigns, as well as pandemic preparedness programs. The device also allows for the possibility of injection of various prophylactic as well as therapeutic vaccines. 

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