The Pandemic Institute will aim to speed up how quickly vaccines can be developed and rolled out in future outbreaks, cutting the time by three to six months.
A new scientific institute aimed at helping the world prevent, prepare and respond more effectively to pandemics is launching today., will offer world-leading clinical and research expertise across all stages of the pandemic lifecycle.
"Really significant pandemics may be 100 years apart but we're facing challenges much more regularly than that," explained the institute's director, Professor Matthew Bayliss.The pandemic has been a 'wake-up call for the world' "This pandemic has shown us that we have to prepare in a way that we've never prepared before. This is a wake-up call for the world," he said.
Three coronaviruses have emerged in the last 20 years - something that has never been seen before - and we should be prepared for more"clinically significant" viruses to appear in future, Prof Bayliss said.His team brings together medical, academic and civic partnerships which can then translate work into policy, solutions and activity. He said this could help control the impact of outbreaks on governments, businesses and individuals across the world.
"We certainly can't predict exactly when the next pandemic will start, but we can make real in-roads into identifying what it's likely to look like, for example, from which animals we might expect pandemic pathogens to spill over into humans, where that's most likely to occur," he said.