Grant: Catalyst Grant: Pandemic Preparedness

A flu outbreak can get out of hand and become a pandemic when the influenza virus responsible for the disease is an entirely new flavor that had not been seen by the human population, and a vaccine against it is yet to be developed. Vaccine candidates will be developed rapidly when a pandemic does occur, but they can only be tested for safety and effectiveness using blood cells in culture. It is therefore crucial to improve methods that can immediately test how well these candidate vaccines work in people who will first get them, so that an informed decision can be made by public health officials as to which of the candidates work best. The goal of our project is to develop new approaches to measuring vaccine effectiveness that is better than the current standard method. Compared to this standard method, our proposed methods will be able to measure vaccine effectiveness simultaneously from more people, and will do it faster, cheaper, and more quantitatively using very little amount of blood. These potential benefits make our methods suited for rapid, high-volume processing of samples when an influenza outbreak does occur. The impact of our studies might have on Canada's pandemic preparedness are tremendous.