EMERGING PATHOGENS - VACCINE DEVELOPMENT & TESTING

Professor Teresa Lambe is the Calleva Head of Vaccine Immunology and a Professor of Vaccinology & Immunology and PSI Investigator  at the University of Oxford. She is leading a research group which improves human health by controlling disease through vaccination – stopping epidemics before they become pandemics.

Prof Lambe is one of the Principal Investigators overseeing the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine programme; she co-designed the vaccine in January 2020, led the preclinical studies, and then oversaw the delivery of the immune results needed to support regulatory approval in late 2020. The vaccine has played a pivotal role in the fight against COVID-19 – estimated to have saved >6 million lives globally in 2021 alone. Prof. Lambe was appointed as an honorary OBE for her services to Sciences and Public Health in the 2021 Queen’s Birthday Honours and recieved the Presidential Distinguished Service Award for the Irish Abroad in 2022.

Prof Lambe’s group are particularly interested in delineating the protective immune response post infection and using these findings to rationally design vaccination strategies to prevent disease. The establishment of long-lived immunity, post vaccination, is also critically important in protecting against infectious disease and is a key focus of the research.

The Lambe group is currently developing and testing vaccines against a number of outbreak pathogens including Crimean-Congo haemorrhagic fever virus, Ebola virus, Marburg virus Disease and Coronaviruses. A number of these vaccines have progressed to clinical trial assessment, including a vaccine against Ebola virus diseases (ChAdOx1 biEBOV); in late 2022, this vaccine was one of three chosen by the WHO to be included in a ring vaccination protocol against the Sudan ebolavirus outbreak in Uganda. In 2023, the team's candidate vaccine against Marburg virus disease was selected by WHO for inclusion in trials to combat Marburg virus disease.