Strengthening Africa’s vaccine research ecosystem

As African countries and development partners ramp up efforts to increase the continent’s vaccine manufacturing capacity, Africa’s vaccine research ecosystem must be strengthened. During the 2013 Ebola outbreak in West Africa, IDRC and international partners supported research to test a new vaccine in Guinea. This vaccine is now the cornerstone of preventing Ebola outbreaks in Africa and beyond. Without known treatments or vaccines for an infectious disease, integrating vaccine research into the response to an outbreak right from the beginning could help save millions of lives. This is why IDRC and Canadian partners are supporting the World Health Organization to strengthen research readiness for future outbreaks in 17 African countries. IDRC is partnering with the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency on a new project to complement basic vaccine research by strengthening capacity for vaccine-related social science research.

To learn where research can support Africa’s vaccine ecosystem, IDRC organized two virtual roundtables in October 2023 and February 2024. For Roundtable 1, the focus was ‘Challenges and opportunities for scaling vaccine manufacturing in Africa‘ and where research can help. The focus for Roundtable 2 was ‘strengthening vaccine delivery and uptake in Africa. How can research help?‘.

IDRC grantee recognized for infectious disease research

Dr Placide Mbala, an IDRC research partner, Dr. Placide Mbala, an IDRC research partner, has been recognized by the international journal Nature for his groundbreaking work on mpox. Dr Mbala is one of the 2024 Nature’s 10, a feature that recognizes key developments in science over the past year and tells the stories of some of the people behind them.

Mbala, an epidemiologist at the Institut National de la Recherche Biomédicale in Kinshasa, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, has been instrumental in tackling the deadly mpox outbreak that spread across Central Africa earlier in 2024, claiming hundreds of lives. His pioneering, innovative research revealed a new strain of the virus, capable of human-to-human transmission, and provided vital insights that have since shaped global response strategies.

IDRC-supported Vaccine Trial

Uganda’s Ministry of Health and WHO with support from IDRC and other partners have launched a first-ever vaccine trial for Ebola Sudan virus. The trial was set up in four days after the outbreak was confirmed.

The research project is jointly funded by IDRC,  the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and the Public Health Agency of Canada paved the way for the grantee, WHO, to co-implement the trial with Uganda’s Ministry of Health and Makerere University.