New AI vaccine research programme launched in Oxford

A child receives a dose of polio vaccine during a door-to-door vaccination campaign in Karachi on September 9 – Copyright AFP Rizwan TABASSUM

The University of Oxford has entered into partnership with the Ellison Institute of Technology (EIT) to use artificial intelligence for vaccine research. This is to the tune of £118 million in funding. The money will be used to launch an ambitious new programme of vaccine research.

This programme aims to be faster, smarter, and better able to respond to infectious disease outbreaks throughout the world, in terms of developing new vaccines to meet new disease challenges.

Conventional vaccine development processes typically span several years. This is because they are challenged by complex processes including antigen discovery, epitope prediction, adjuvant formulation, and rigorous clinical trial designs. Al can speed this process up.

The project will be led by the Oxford Vaccine Group. This is a new initiative based in the University’s CoI-AI (Correlates of Immunity-Artificial Intelligence) arena. The process will combine Oxford’s human challenge studies, immune science, and vaccine development with EITs Artificial Intelligence (AI) innovation technology. EIT’s activities include generative biology, clinical medicine, plant science, sustainable energy, and public policy. The computing capability is provided by Oracle.

The initial focus will seek to better understand how the body fights infection and how vaccines protect us. The research will explore how vaccines work at both a cellular and system-wide level, by studying infections in real time, in people, and using smart immunology tools and data to find the answers.

Specifically, the CoI-AI programme will study how the immune system responds to important microorganisms that cause serious infections and contribute to antibiotic resistance – such as Streptococcus pneumoniae, Staphylococcus aureus, and Escherichia coli, – amongst others.

Such bacteria cause widespread illness but resist traditional vaccine approaches. Researchers will use human challenge models (where volunteers are safely exposed to bacteria under controlled conditions) and apply modern immunology and AI tools to pinpoint the immune responses that predict protection.

Professor Sir Andrew Pollard, Director of the Oxford Vaccine Group explains further, noting: “This programme addresses one of the most urgent problems in infectious disease by helping us to understand immunity more deeply to develop innovative vaccines against deadly diseases that have so far evaded our attempts at prevention. By combining advanced immunology with artificial intelligence, and using human challenge models to study diseases, CoI-AI will provide the tools we need to tackle serious infections and reduce the growing threat of antibiotic resistance. This is a new frontier in vaccine science.”