Vaccines R&D & Vaccination

Eelko Hak has completed his PhD on the Clinical Epidemiology of Influenza and real-world effects of vaccination from Utrecht University and Postdoctoral studies from Boston University, Erasmus Rotterdam University and Johns Hopkins University. He is the Director of the unit pharmacoepidemiology, Groningen Research Institute of Pharmacy, University Groningen, the Netherlands with 10 PhDs, two postdocs, three datamanagers and educational staff. He has been supervising 23 PhDs and has published more than 350 publications in reputed journals among which influenza vaccine publications in Lancet Infectious Diseases (2011, 2014, 2015) and Lancet Respiratory Medicine (2017). He was the UNISEC working Package Leader on the clinical vaccine trial program (https://www.unisecconsortium.eu/). He is currently project leader of the University Groningen and University Medical Center Groningen PharmLines Initiative (www.pharmlines.nl) combining medication and vaccination data with cohort data from over 60,000 people from the University Groningen Lifelines Cohort to pursue personalized drug and vaccination studies.

Over the last seasons, the excess mortality during influenza epidemics was very high, notably among older people. Current influenza vaccines can be effective during epidemics if the antigenic match between circulating strains and the vaccine composition is good. In this presentation, we will show meta-analytical results of test-negative case-control design studies conducted nationally and globally on the effect estimates of current influenza vaccines. Moreover, we will present the design of the Universal Influenza vaccines Secured (UNISEC) consortium funded by the European Union as well as results from phase 2b vaccine trials with promising universal influenza vaccines from SEEK (Flu-v) and BIONDVAX (M-001). Both companies have been pursuing the design of pivotal phase 3 trials for possible registration since 2018.