Academic Creativity to Accelerate Technological Transfer for a COVID-19 Vaccine

Texas Children’s Center for Vaccine Development at Baylor College of Medicine for the past 22 years, has acquired an international reputation as an academic-based product development partnership. Its mission is to advance vaccines for poverty-related neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) and emerging diseases. In 2020, we used its extensive prior knowledge and expertise with SARS and MERS vaccine research & development to forge strategic global alliances and accelerate the design, engineering, process development, technological transfer and preclinical evaluation of a COVID-19 subunit vaccine with the goal to advance a low-cost, affordable, safe, effective, and globally accessible vaccine. An overview is provided of the end-to-end vision of how academic knowledge and innovation for a recombinant protein-based COVID-19 vaccine resulted in successful technological transfers for a product suitable for global access.