PREPAIR-VAC is a Horizon Europe collaborative project bringing together leading experts in vaccinology, artificial intelligence, immunology, recombinant manufacturing, public health preparedness, and ethics to accelerate innovative vaccine preparedness strategies for future pandemics and emerging infectious diseases.

Who are we?

Vision

The world remains vulnerable to pandemics, over 70% of emerging infectious diseases are zoonotic in origin. Yet today's vaccine development remains reactive, a circulating strain must be identified before a vaccine can be designed, leaving critical time lost while diseases spread.

The goal is to dramatically shorten the path from outbreak to available vaccine doses.

Our vision is to combine this AI-driven vaccine designing with “One Health vaccinology" to explore synergies between human and veterinary immunology for vaccine development.

Strategy

PREPAIR-VAC’s main objective is to establish and validate a rapid, scalable, and modular AI-driven pipeline for vaccine development for H1N1 influenza that addresses every critical component of the pipeline: identification and prediction of pathogens, antigen selection and vaccine conception. To achieve this ambitious goal, we have designed a comprehensive methodology that couples the development of AI toolkits with efficient technologies for vaccine manufacturing and formulation with potential for rapid upscale and efficient roll out. Importantly, our proposal addresses not only technological and biological challenges, but also ethical, legal, and social (ELSI) aspects of pandemic response and vaccine acceptance.

Impact

PREPAIR-VAC will establish and validate an AI-driven pipeline capable of delivering effective vaccines for future viral threats, ensuring that end users, public health authorities, regulators and the general public recognise AI-enabled vaccines as credible, rapid and scalable cornerstone of pandemic preparedness.

Vaccination stands out as the most effective public-health measure to prevent the impact of viral threats. But, despite the advances in vaccine platforms, both the rapid mutation of certain viruses and the limited capacity of platforms to adapt swiftly continue to hinder timely vaccine development and deployment.

AI-driven vaccine design for a pandemic-ready Europe

PREPAIR-VAC at a glance:

Coordinator:

European Vaccine Initiative (EVI)

Timeline:

European Union - Horizon Europe Programme

Funding:

€6.57 Million