Vaccine Informatics
The Strategic Center of Biomedical Advanced Vaccine Research and Development for Preparedness and Response (SCARDA), established under the Japan Agency for Medical Research and Development (AMED) based on the "Government Strategy to Strengthen Vaccine Development and Production to Enable Rapid Approval," has launched a project to establish world-leading R&D centers for vaccine development in Japan. Nagasaki University applied to be one of the centers with three main topics: "Response to tropical infectious diseases," "Vaccine development against advanced BSL-4 pathogens," and "Vaccine development using artificial intelligence (AI)," and was selected as one of the vaccine R&D centers.
Members
- Professor
- Kaidre Bendjama
- Associate Professor
- Sebastian Kjell-Ove Kapell
- Assistant Professor
- Anja Mösch
- Assistant
- Eriko Hashimoto
Activities
The development of infectious disease vaccines using AI is a new initiative for the university, established in collaboration with NEC Oncoimmunity AS (NOI), a Norwegian company owned by NEC with headquarters in Tokyo. Professor Trevor Clancy, Chief Science Officer at NOI, has joined this collaboration together with Associate Professor Sebastian Kapell, Senior Bioinformatician at NOI, to develop a new center of research on the topic of vaccine informatics. The aim of the center is to integrate cutting-edge AI and computational biology into the vaccine development programs at Nagasaki University. This work is further supported by the cross-appointment of Assistant Professor Anja Mösch, a research scientist from the NEC European Laboratories (NLE), making this a joint international undertaking across academic institutions and the biotechnology industry. The goal is not only to develop a vaccine research center for combating infectious diseases in Japan but also to establish a truly international center that can attract human resources from around the world, contributing to t he 100-day mission of vaccine development.