CEPI’s Funds Fund Oxford Vaccine Development Simulator to Guide Vaccine Developers to Prepare for Crisis

Within the University of Oxford Nuffield Department of Medicine is born a new research project, known as &lsquo;PREpare using Simulated Trial Optimisation (PRESTO),&rsquo; a computer-generated simulation to guide future vaccine clinical trials. What&rsquo;s paying for this effort? A U.S. $80 million deal via a strategic partnership between the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) and the University of Oxford to accelerate the development of vaccines against diseases with pandemic potential. The premise behind this effort was that intelligent simulations would generate important insights for vaccine developers as well as public health officials on what vaccine clinical trial designs could help stop the spread of an emerging pathogen. 
The latest instance of this effort taps into up to U.S. $2.4 million in funding from the CEPI deal mentioned previously. Researchers at the Pandemic Sciences Institute will simulate real-life scenarios of deadly disease outbreaks in order to model how possible vaccine clinical trials could run and what outcomes they could produce.