$70 Million Grant to Develop "Plug-and-Play" Vaccines and Antibody-based Therapies

Albert Einstein College of Medicine recently announced it received a five-year, $14 million per year grant from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) to participate in a broad national effort to develop "plug-and-play" vaccines and antibody-based therapies against a wide range of emerging viruses.

The Einstein-led consortium, called PROVIDENT (Prepositioning Optimized Strategies for Vaccines and Immunotherapeutics Against Diverse Emerging Infectious Threats), will link 13 teams in academia, government, and industry that will conduct four projects designed to:

Discover and analyze virus-host interactions and the molecular mechanisms involved in viral disease,

Design proteins to elicit antiviral immune responses and then evaluate and optimize those responses,

Create “road maps” for quickly developing RNA vaccines against microbes with pandemic potential, and

Map the antibody responses observed in people infected with viruses and use this knowledge to design vaccines and therapeutics.

PROVIDENT builds on NIAID’s 2021 Pandemic Preparedness Plan, which focuses on “priority pathogens” and “prototype pathogens.” Priority pathogens include viruses known to cause significant human illness or death, such as dengue and Ebola.

“Recent outbreaks of mpox, Nipah virus, and Eastern equine encephalitis, among other viral infections, underscore the need for an even broader preparedness program,” said Eva Mittler, Ph.D., research assistant professor at Einstein and leader of one of the PROVIDENT components, in a press release on September 13, 2024.

“We don't know what virus will cause the next pandemic.”

The $70 million grant is part of NIAID’s new Research and Development of Vaccines and Monoclonal Antibodies for Pandemic Preparedness (ReVAMPP) Network.

The ReVAMPP network focuses on viruses from the Flaviviridae family, which features viruses that cause dengue and yellow fever; the Paramyxoviridae family, which contains viruses that cause measles, mumps, and Nipah-induced encephalitis; the Picornaviridae family, whose members cause poliomyelitis, foot-and-mouth disease, and myocarditis; the Togaviridae family, which contains viruses that induce Chikungunya virus-induced arthralgia or encephalitis and Venezuelan equine encephalitis; as well as viruses from 5 different families within the Bunyavirales order, including Sin Nombre virus from the Hantaviridae family and the viruses that cause Rift Valley Fever (Phenuiviridae), Crimean Congo Hemorrhagic Fever (Nairoviridae), Oropouche Fever (Peribunyaviridae), and Lassa Fever (Arenaviridae).