Vaccines save 2.5 million lives each year, and the 270 experimental vaccines in the pipeline could help that number grow.
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Most children in the United States聽receive 35 vaccination shots by their fifth birthday. (Cue the crying.) That may sound like a lot, but public health experts believe we need even more鈥攁 lot more. The current roster of routine childhood vaccines in the United States聽protects against 16 infectious diseases, and the World Health Organization estimates that overall, vaccines save 2.5 million lives each year. Yet an even larger number of people die annually from malaria, tuberculosis, and HIV/AIDS combined.
The good news is that there are a historic number of experimental vaccines in the pipeline鈥270 and counting鈥攁imed at preventing these 3 global killers, along with 51 other infectious diseases. The new at 嘿嘿视频 Health, launched this year by Mark J. Mulligan, MD, a nationally renowned infectious disease investigator recently recruited from Emory University, will build on this extraordinary momentum through a combination of basic research and clinical trials.
鈥淰accine research is of the highest importance to humankind,鈥 says Dr. Mulligan, the Jeffrey P. Bergstein Professor of Medicine and director of the . 鈥淲e still lack vaccines for many long-standing diseases, and new threats like Zika and Ebola continue to emerge. The center鈥檚 mission is to discover new vaccines to protect and restore human health.鈥
Dr. Mulligan鈥檚 own lab will focus on developing a universal influenza vaccine, a national priority to contain one of the deadliest infectious diseases in the United States, accounting for 80,000 deaths last season alone. The Holy Grail, he says, is a single shot, perhaps with a booster every 5 to 10 years, that inoculates against all influenza strains and eliminates the annual hit-or-miss scramble to predict dominant strains for each flu season.
The center will also investigate therapeutic vaccines鈥攍ike the one , professor of microbiology, is developing against HIV鈥攖hat train the body鈥檚 immune system to fight existing infections. It鈥檚 a fast-growing strategy now being explored to treat everything from Alzheimer鈥檚 disease to diabetes, but cancer tops the list: currently nearly half of the vaccines in clinical trials target cancer鈥攁 trend that Dr. Mulligan, professor of medicine and microbiology, believes will only grow. 鈥淐ancer vaccines are an exciting field, reinvigorated in the new era of immunotherapy, and we will recruit researchers and collaborate with investigators and clinicians to develop them,鈥 says Dr. Mulligan.
