Human vaccines: past successes, future challenges and opportunities for active immunization and immunotherapy

On Thursday, September 30, the Institute of Biotechnology welcomed a distinguished guest, Noel Barrett.

Dr. Barrett has more than 35 years of experience in vaccination and biology with responsibility management covering the complete development process required to import vaccine products into market. He was a leader in the development and licensing of a new formulation of Baxter Tick-borne Encephalitis Vaccine (FSME-Immun), Meningococcus C (NeisVac-C), cell-culture derived pandemic H5N1 (Vepacel), H1N1 (Celvapan) and seasonal influenza vaccines (Preflucel) and was leader of the Baxter group which, in collaboration with a partner company, developed a cell culture derived smallpox vaccine which was licensed in a number of countries including the US.

During his visit he gave a talk on “Human vaccines: past successes, future challenges and opportunities for active immunization and immunotherapy “. In his presentation he summarized major successes in human infectious disease vaccines and indicated remaining challenges for development of prophylactic vaccines against major infectious disease targets and therapeutic vaccines for chronic infectious diseases.

Picture: Noel Barrett and Petr Malý, Head of Laboratory of Ligand Engineering