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

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, from which GRA concluded that Georgia is at the intersection of capability and opportunity in vaccine and therapeutic development.

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 Investigators 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 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 new GRA Eminent Scholars: 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; Brian Leyland-Jones, a leading cancer researcher, from McGill University in Montreal; Guido Silvestri, one of the nation's leading researchers in HIV/AIDS, from the University of Pennsylvania; and Jian-Dong Li, a top researcher in the field of inflammatory diseases, from the University of Rochester. 
• Awarding $4.1 million in Collaboration Planning Grants to promote joint university-based research and commercialization projects on a wide range of disease targets. These projects have already attracted some $40 million in additional federal and foundation grants and have generated new intellectual property that could form the basis for new or improved vaccines and therapeutics. 
• Launching the GRA Distinguished Investigators program to recruit “rising stars” in next-generation vaccines and therapeutics research
• Hosting annual events in partnership with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the CDC Foundation, to foster scientific exchange and collaboration among researchers from Georgia's academic institutions and the CDC, and to strengthen relationships among institutions
• Enhancing research capabilities and providing matching funds for research infrastructure to help to attract and expand centers of excellence at the state's research universities; examples include:
  • Emory Vaccine Center
  • Animal Health Research Center at the University of Georgia
  • Center for AIDS Research at Emory University
  • Immunotherapy Center at Georgia Health Sciences University
  • Center for Drug Design, Development and Delivery at Georgia Institute of Technology
  • Center for Inflammation, Immunity and Infection at Georgia State University

• 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.