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UAntwerpen opens the doors to Vaccinopolis
Vaccinopolis
Vaccinopolis opened its doors on Friday, March 25th 2022. The unique vaccine research centre on Campus Drie Eiken will test vaccines against all kinds of pathogens, to further speed up efforts to combat new and existing diseases. “With Vaccinopolis, we are putting our country on the map,” says Pierre Van Damme (UAntwerpen), the driving force behind the project. “Together with our partners, we want to build an innovation ecosystem for combating pandemics.”
Developing vaccines is one of the biggest global challenges facing us today.
“Covid has made us very aware of this,” explains vaccinologist Prof Pierre Van Damme (UAntwerpen). “But we have been aware of it for a long time. The climate is changing, people are living closer together, we are travelling more and more often and we are getting older: all these developments contribute towards a faster and wider spread of viruses.”
“Together with its partners, the University of Antwerp is building an innovation ecosystem to combat pandemics.” Vaccinopolis is an important part of that ecosystem. The centre will test candidate vaccines against numerous infectious diseases, such as RSV, dengue fever and whooping cough. It will also investigate how to improve known flu vaccines.
Administering pathogens
In the brand-new Vaccinopolis complex, ambulatory studies will be conducted and followed up by the Centre for the Evaluation of Vaccinations. In these studies, participating volunteers come in for check-ups at regular intervals. But what makes Vaccinopolis truly unique is its ability to conduct CHIM studies.
Van Damme: “CHIM stands for Controlled Human Infection Model and means that test subjects are first given a vaccine or a placebo and then intentionally given a reduced dose of a pathogen. This allows researchers to speed up testing on whether and how a particular candidate vaccine works. There is no comparable facility on this scale in continental Europe. To find a comparable facility you would have to look in the United States or Britain.”
Full quarantine
Vaccinopolis has 30 beds. In some of the studies, test subjects will spend several weeks in full quarantine. This is done partly for safety reasons: the pathogens obviously must not be allowed to escape into society. On the other hand, it also allows the volunteers to be monitored as closely as possible.
“That allows you to take daily samples from the subjects,” says Dr Ilse De Coster, head of the clinical trial team. “Based on those characteristics, we can also eventually try to predict how specific groups of people will respond to a particular vaccine. Every study is pre-approved by an independent ethics committee and the regulatory authorities (FAMHP). Studies are only conducted with pathogens for which there is already a treatment.”
Different security levels
The building was completed in record time: the entire process took just 14 months. “Usually, it takes four to five years to implement a project like this,” says chief architect Roy Pype (Proof of the sum). “But the circumstances were exceptional: COVID-19 has proven that viruses can strike quickly and unexpectedly.”
Proof of the sum, Exilab, Abstract Architects, burO Groen and Establis were responsible for the overall design. It was implemented by Jansen Building Group, formerly Group Jansen; Jansen Cleanrooms and Cordeel. Imtech Belgium and Jansen Cleanrooms will provide maintenance for 15 years. The work was completed quickly, but nothing was left to chance in terms of biosecurity. Strict decontamination procedures are used throughout the complex, and special filters filter all the outgoing air.
UAntwerpen x ULB
The federal government invested €20 million in Vaccinopolis and the Institute for Medical Immunology at ULB. There is close cooperation with the University in Brussels: it has an excellent reputation in the field of human vaccine immunology and a state-of-the-art immunology laboratory.
Private partners also invested in the creation of Vaccinopolis. The Flemish government’s Covid recovery plan made €5.3 million available for the development of an innovation ecosystem for combating pandemics, as indicated in the Voka Chamber of Commerce Antwerp-Waasland Roadmap 2030.
Volunteers wanted
Vaccinopolis did not come from nowhere. UAntwerpen gained a lot of experience from the Poliopolis project in 2017. Thirty people spent 28 days in a hermetically sealed container ‘village’ to test a new vaccine against childhood polio during a kind of CHIM study. “The volunteers mainly took part for altruistic reasons,” says Ilse De Coster. “There was a student who wanted to finish his thesis, someone who remotely renovated his office, and another person who wrote a book.”
As with Poliopolis, test subjects in Vaccinopolis will be extensively screened for physical and mental health before they are eligible to participate. UAntwerpen is constantly looking for healthy volunteers for its vaccine studies. Equitable compensation is provided for each study you participate in.