Positioning Georgia as a world leader in next-generation vaccines and therapeutics

In 2007, the Georgia Research Alliance launched a bold initiative to position Georgia as a world leader in discovering a new class of vaccines and therapeutics.

GRA’s Next-Generation Vaccines and Therapeutics Initiative leverages the talent and infrastructure strengths of Georgia’s major research universities to promote new investment in discovery. The initiative was developed after intensive studies of the most promising areas of focus in research. Download brochure (.pdf)

From those studies, GRA concluded that Georgia is at the intersection of capability and opportunity in vaccine and therapeutic development. The market opportunity is tremendous: Next-generation vaccines and therapeutics are projected to be a combined $34 billion market by 2010.

These new forms of vaccines and therapeutics are far more sophisticated than the types of vaccines most familiar to people. They marshal the immune system to prevent and treat diseases like arthritis, malaria, cancer, diabetes and HIV/AIDS.

The GRA initiative has three primary goals:

1. Become a global center for discovering and developing next-generation vaccines and therapeutics. GRA is adding to its talent base of GRA Eminent Scholars by recruiting more world-class researchers who work on the most advanced methods for developing next-generation vaccines and therapeutics. GRA is also recruiting the "rising stars" in this area of research through its Distinguished Investigors program. GRA is building on its research infrastructure and expanding research facilities specifically to help scientists make breakthrough discoveries in vaccines and therapeutics.

2. Become a model for research collaboration. Already, Georgia’s research universities have excellent partnerships with each other, and with private industry. GRA’s initiative has launched ways to take this collaboration to an entirely new level. Among them: new symposia and roundtables involving academia, industry and federal laboratories, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and new seed grants to foster early-stage collaborative research.

3. Grow the economy and create new jobs. GRA’s VentureLab program helps new companies form around new discoveries. In fact, VentureLab has helped attract a 10-to-1 return for every dollar invested by the state of Georgia. Now, GRA is engineering a comprehensive strategy to propel investment in promising new vaccine and therapeutics companies at all stages of development. 

GRA has taken a number of steps to advance toward those goals. Among them:

• Recruiting four new GRA Eminent Scholars: Joe Tsien, a leading neuroscientist and innovator in the fields of memory, cognition and systems neurobiology, from Boston University; Allan Kirk, an internationally acclaimed surgical scientist and authority on transplant immunology, from the National Institutes of Health; Max Cooper, a pioneer in understanding how the immune system functions, from the University of Alabama-Birmingham; and Brian Leyland-Jones, a leading cancer researcher, from McGill University in Montreal. 
• Awarding 2.7 million in Collaboration Planning Grants to promote joint university-based research and commercialization projects on a wide range of disease targets
• Recruiting four GRA Distinguished Investigators program who are “rising stars” in next-generation vaccines and therapeutics research
• Creating the GRA-CDC Roundtable, a forum for sharing research ideas and interests, spawning new scientific collaborations and strengthening relationships among institutions
• Providing support to develop a pilot facility in UGA's Animal Health Research Center for the manufacturing of vaccines and other biological products

• Developing communications to broaden awareness of the initiative, including an e-newsletter, Pathways

In the years ahead, GRA will continue working to build broad and deep support for the Next-Generation Vaccines and Therapeutics Initiative. E-mail GRA to share your ideas or questions. And subscribe to Pathways if you want to stay abreast of new developments in the Initiative.