Vaccination: Research

(asked on 11th April 2019) - View Source

Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, pursuant to his oral contribution on 26 March 2019 to Question 910028 on Antimicrobial Resistance: Vaccines, what steps his Department is taking to stimulate research and development into vaccines, including for tuberculosis, as an alternative to antibiotics.


Answered by
Seema Kennedy Portrait
Seema Kennedy
This question was answered on 24th April 2019

The United Kingdom national action plan on antimicrobial resistance (AMR), published on 24 January 2019, contains the commitment to continue to support research into new and alternative treatments, vaccines and diagnostic tests.

The Government has invested over £350 million in AMR research and development since 2014, including research funding calls with vaccination in scope, most recently the £32 million capital funding call lead by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR), and the Small Business Research Initiative competition which announced its awards in January 2019. We would expect to consider the role of vaccines for AMR in future programmatic funding.

The UK supports the development of vaccines through UK Aid programmes such as the Global AMR Innovation Fund (GAMRIF) and the UK Vaccine Network. GAMRIF is a £50 million fund to support innovative research and development for AMR, for the benefit of people in low- and middle-income countries, and invests £30 million into preventative measures in human and animal health, including vaccines for AMR not including tuberculosis (TB). The fund includes a £1 million work package with the Bacterial Vaccinology Network which supports early stage research and development around the world to drive the development and uptake of vaccines for AMR in humans and animals.

The UK supports TB vaccine research through the Medical Research Council (MRC), with support to the European and Developing Countries Clinical Trials Partnership, and through the Joint Global Health Clinical Trials programme represented by the Department for International Development (DFID), MRC, NIHR and Wellcome. DFID’s Agriculture research team is supporting work on bovine TB vaccine development in partnership with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

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