Vaccine Trials Expanded Across United States

There will be one more institution conducting studies and tests on the safety and effectiveness of vaccines. The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease (NIAID) has announced that it has awarded contracts for vaccine testing, and this year there will be eight institutions involved in the research rather than seven as in the past.

The sites chosen, known as Vaccine and Treatment Evaluation Units (VTEUs), will receive funding from the NIAID, which itself is a part of the National Institutes of Health. The particular grants that were awarded today will provide nearly $24 million to each of the selected VTEUs over the course of seven years. The funding is to be used for clinical trials of new and existing vaccines.

Past vaccines that were tested and studied at VTEUs include those used to inoculate individuals against whooping cough, pneumonia, and most notably influenza. Some other diseases and their vaccines that have been part of the NIAID and VTEU program are malaria, smallpox, anthrax, and tularemia. The program also focuses on vaccines that can be combined into one inoculation, such as the vaccine that can guard against Chickenpox and Measles/Mumps/Rubella (MMR) in one shot.

The VTEUs involved in the vaccine trials and studies will also be able to involve many participants in the studies, not only with the funding involved but with the sheer number of sites that are included in the program. Many studies will be conducted concurrently at multiple sites, which increases the data that can be used to evaluate the safety and effectiveness of the vaccines. This is helpful in expediting clinical trials, which is becoming more and more important as new diseases are cropping up, such as the Avian Flu.

The VTEU program started in 1962, and has been instrumental in studying and evaluating many widely used vaccines. Due to the number of VTEUs, many vaccines have been approved by the Food and Drug Administration much faster than they would have if the trials were conducted at only one institution, such as a University or a pharmaceutical firm.

Vaccine delivery methods have also been a focus of the VTEU program over the last few years. In the last decade, six VTEUs conducted trials of an influenza vaccine delivered via a nasal spray. Another VTEU is working on an edible vaccine used to fight E. coli.

The main idea behind a vaccine is that the vaccine will introduce a low dose of weakened form of a disease to an individual in order to produce an autoimmune response, which will then create a way for the body to fight against a possible infection or virus. For this, VTEUs are outfitted to be able to accommodate in-patient stays for those participating clinical trials. If the study subject is isolated, it can speed up the course of not only the vaccine's progress, but also that of the study itself.

The sites chosen for the VTEU funding are Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas; Emory University in Atlanta, Saint Louis University, the University of Iowa in Iowa City, the University of Maryland in Baltimore, and Vanderbilt University in Nashville. Sites outside of the university system include Cincinnati's Children's Hospital Medical Center and the Group Health Cooperative in Seattle. Each site and the trials there are supervised by a principal investigator at each site.

Source: National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention