Grant: Foundation Grant

Influenza remains a major cause of death and illness in Canada and globally. "Seasonal" flu vaccines remain the mainstay of flu control, but their field effectiveness, especially among the sick and elderly who need them the most, is questionable. Newer expensive vaccines with limited data have mushroomed raising the cost and complexity of vaccine programs. Flu vaccine effectiveness (VE) is influenced by vaccine potency and uptake; viral strain, infectivity and virulence and by host characteristics; factors that often vary by season, product and population. Progress towards developing better vaccines has been hampered by dogma, and over-reliance on poorly validated immune correlates, paucity of clinical trials due to ethical/practical constraints and fragmentary reductionist approaches to post-licensure evaluation. Flu VE cannot be understood using one-off studies limited to specific seasons, populations and outcomes, and interpreted in isolation of viral and host characteristics. Our challenge is to design effective & sustainable strategies of continually and comprehensively evaluating conventional and novel flu vaccines and understanding their complex interactions with viral, host & environmental factors. I envision a safe and effective societal response to both seasonal epidemics and& pandemics. To this end, I propose to further develop our rapid analytics platform built on a continually updated comprehensive data warehouse and use it to address knowledge gaps, guide decision-making and develop new vaccine research methods. This research program will create methods and tools to create data warehouses and automate rapid analysis of their data which can be shared with other provinces and to develop an integrated rich data to facilitate research and quality improvement initiatives. The program will also provide excellent opportunities for training new researchers & knowledge users.