The VALIDATE Network has been awarded a further £600,000 from the Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund for our work accelerating vaccine development for neglected intracellular pathogens, particularly tuberculosis (TB), leishmaniasis, leprosy and melioidosis.
VALIDATE is an engaged and interactive community of researchers forming new cross-pathogen, cross-continent, cross-species and cross-discipline collaborations, generating new ideas, taking advantage of synergies and quickly disseminating lessons learned across the Network, accelerating vaccine research and development for our focus pathogens.
Directors Professor Helen McShane (University of Oxford) and Associate Professor Helen Fletcher (LSHTM) said, “This additional funding provides a wonderful validation of VALIDATE’s network approach, focussing on complex neglected pathogens causing significant disease in low and middle income countries. This additional funding will allow us to expand our vision and scope, including supporting Early Career Researchers with Fellowships, and funding further pump-priming projects to advance science in our field.”
VALIDATE’s pump-priming grants fund excellent science that will advance vaccine development. Projects must involve collaboration between our members, who can be from academia, industry, governmental, and not-for-profit organisations. The £50,000 awards aim to produce crucial initial and proof-of-concept data that can then be used to apply for larger Fellowship and external grant funding. VALIDATE runs one call per year, with six exciting projects awarded funding in 2017.
The VALIDATE Fellowship call is open now. This will fund 1-2 Early Career Researcher members for two years' independent scientific research with the aim of producing pilot data, and a funding and experience track record, that can be used by the Fellow to go on to obtain independent external funding and launch their career as a Principal Investigator and Group Leader.
VALIDATE aims to both accelerate vaccine research and facilitate career progression for our members through building new collaborations, providing funding and training opportunities, a mentoring scheme, workshops and seminars, and hosting a central hub website and social media highlighting news relevant to our members. We currently have 113 members from 23 countries around the world. Joining is free and researchers working in this research area are encouraged to apply for membership – by working together we will advance research more quickly and effectively.
Published: 2 March 2018
