Lessons learned from the bumpy road of COVID-19 vaccine development

The development of prophylactic vaccines starts with the design of an immunogen that not only needs to elicit a protective immune response but also has features that support large scale manufacturing. After these features are confirmed in the laboratory, the vaccine is tested in humans, first for safety and quality and magnitude of the immune response, and then for optimal dose level and dosing schedule. When this is sorted out, the efficacy of a vaccine in protecting against infection or disease caused by the targeted pathogen, is tested in phase 3 studies that require thousands of people.

Normally, this process takes about 15 to 20 years and scientists from different disciplines are involved in these different phases of vaccine development. For the development of our Covid-19 vaccine however, things had to go slightly faster: we went from vaccine design to efficacy data in humans within a year, obviously without cutting corners and without giving in on safety.

Who was doing what and how did people keep their cool under these challenging circumstances? Come listen to an unprecedented learning experience!

Hanneke Schuitemaker | VP, Global Head of Viral Vaccine Discovery and Translational Medicine | Janssen Vaccines & Prevention

Hanneke Schuitemaker, Ph.D., is the Head of Viral Vaccine Discovery and Translational Medicine and Disease Area Stronghold Leader for Viral Vaccines at Janssen Vaccines & Prevention B.V. She has been in these roles since 2010 and oversees Janssen’s viral vaccine programs including investigational vaccine candidates for HIV, respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), Ebola, Zika, COVID-19 and HPV. In addition, she is a Professor of Virology at the Amsterdam University Medical Center.

Hanneke Schuitemaker is a medical biologist by training, received her Ph.D. in Medicine in 1992 at the University of Amsterdam and worked for more than 20 years on HIV-1 pathogenesis, first at Sanquin (1989-2007), the blood supply foundation in the Netherlands, where she was the Chair of the department of Clinical Viro-Immunology (1998-2007), and then at the Amsterdam University Medical Center (2008-2010), where she was the Chair of the Department of Experimental Immunology. From mid-2003 to mid-2004, she worked as a visiting scientist at The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California. She successfully trained more than 30 Ph.D. students and co-authored more than 320 peer-reviewed scientific articles.