VI-SK Bioscience Park MahnHoon Award
The International Vaccine Institute (IVI) and SK bioscience announced Prof. Sarah Gilbert as one of the winners of the second IVI-SK bioscience Park ManhHoon Award.
Andrew Pollard / Sarah Gilbert and Rino Rappuoli / Mariagrazia Pizza are two groups of co-recipients of this award. It recognizes the outstanding contributions of the individuals and groups to the discovery, development, and delivery of vaccines and the promotion of global health.
This annual award was launched in 2022 to commemorate the legacy of the late Vice Chairman Dr. Park MahnHoon of SK bioscience.
“IVI, jointly with SK bioscience, is pleased to announce the selection of the winners of the second set of IVI-SKBS Park MahnHoon awards. The award recipients are Profs. Andrew Pollard and Sarah Gilbert for their work on COVID-19 and other critical global health and emerging disease vaccines and Drs. Rino Rappuoli and Mariagrazia Pizza for their development of new, more scientific approaches to the development of all vaccines,” said Dr. Jerome Kim, Director General of IVI.
“These two groups of vaccine champions have spearheaded the development of vaccines against COVID-19 and meningitis, respectively, which have saved numerous lives and advanced vaccine science and global public health.”
This year’s award ceremony will take place at IVI on April 25, the second anniversary of Dr. Park’s death. The award prize includes a funding of 100 million Korean won (approx. US$85,000).
Sarah Gilbert
Prof. Sarah Gilbert, Professor of Vaccinology at the University of Oxford, is a Sunhak Peace Prize 2022 laureate. She co-developed the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine and was the driving force behind the creation of this novel adenoviral vectored COVID vaccine. More than 3.1 billion doses of the vaccine have been released for supply to over 180 countries. This number includes over 580 million doses that were made available to COVAX for low- and middle-income countries. It supplied about 31 percent of all COVAX related vaccines.
As a leader of vaccine advocacy, she is also the author of the book ‘Vaxxers: The Inside Story of the Oxford AstraZeneca Vaccine and the Race Against the Virus.’ Her work also focuses on the rapid transfer of vaccines into GMP manufacturing. It is part of the efforts to accelerate the development and introduction of new vaccines.
Andrew Pollard
Prof. Andrew Pollard is Director of the Oxford Vaccine Group in the Department of Pediatrics at the University of Oxford. He led the clinical development of the Oxford-AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine across 3 continents. This vaccine became one of the first and most widely administered vaccines in the fight against the pandemic. He has conducted extensive clinical, basic and epidemiological research crucial to the understanding of the burden of vaccine-preventable diseases and has led pioneering work on meningococcal, pneumococcal, typhoid and COVID-19 vaccines which underpins global policy on immunization against these diseases.
Rappuoli and Pizza
Dr. Rino Rappuoli and Dr. Mariagrazia Pizza jointly pioneered a new more scientific approach to vaccine development. “Reverse vaccinology” takes what we understand aboutimmune responses to design an optimal vaccine candidate. Together, they developed a new vaccine against the Type B meningococcus, a devastating infection of the nervous system that occurs most commonly in infants.
This vaccine is now licensed (Bexero) and has shown to be highly efficacious in preventing the disease. Dr. Rappuoli is now the Scientific Director of Biotecnopolo di Siena Foundation in Italy and was formerly the Chief Scientist at GSK Vaccines.
Dr. Mariagrazia Pizza is former Senior Scientific Director Bacterial Vaccines at GSK. In the 1980s, she took on a project aimed at designing genetically detoxified pertussis toxin.
In 1999, she became the project leader for the identification of new Meningococcus B antigens using the ‘reverse vaccinology’ approach. This allowed the development of the MenB vaccine, which has been licensed in more than 40 countries worldwide.
Link to original article Profs. Andrew Pollard / Sarah Gilbert and Drs. Rino Rappuoli / Mariagrazia Pizza named winners of second IVI – SK bioscience Park MahnHoon Award – IVI
Learn more about Sarah Gilbert Peace Prize Laureates – LAUREATES – Sunhak Peace Prize
