Pandemic Preparedness: The Role of Virus-Restricted Vaccines and Universal Antiviral Drugs
BRIEF ABSTRACT
Pandemic Preparedness as a concept has four unknowns to deal with: 1) how often can we expect a pandemic causing excess mortality and morbidity to occur, 2) what virus will cause it?, 3) are panzoonotic infections a harbinger of a human pandemic driven by human to human transmission, and 4) does the change in climate increases the frequency of panzoonotics and pandemics? Recent data on 12,000 mammalian virus-host interactions suggest that enveloped viruses are the most likely cause of the next pandemic and among those a segmented enveloped RNA virus with a high rate of antigenic drift and shift, maximizing viral escape from immune interventions, may present the biggest threat. Currently members of the panzoonotic H5 virus family are spreading rapidly among birds and a wide range of mammal species. Evidence will be presented that a combination of an easy-to-use universal antiviral drug for the first 100 days able to prevent human-to-human transmission and a series of prime and boost virus family-specific vaccines thereafter protecting against severe human disease by consecutive and fast evolving virus strains and clades may present the best of options to prevent catastrophic events.
SHORT BIO
Jaap Goudsmit has an MD and PhD degree from the University of Amsterdam. He was a Fogarthy Scientist at the National Institutes of Health from 1978 till 1983 and was full professor of virology at the University of Amsterdam from 1989-2000.
Jaap Goudsmit was Chief Scientific Officer of the Vaccine Company Crucell from 2000 till 2011 when the company was acquired by Johnson and Johnson in 2011 and developed an Adenovirus vaccine platform resulting in licensed vaccines against Ebola and Covid-19. Jaap Goudsmit authored over 500 scientific publications, many of whom appeared in Nature, Science and PNAS.
Jaap Goudsmit headed the Crucell Vaccine Institute (2011 – 2014) and the Janssen Prevention Center (2014 – 2017) at Johnson and Johnson. In 2017 he joined the faculty of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health as adjunct professor of Epidemiology and Immunology of Infectious Diseases. Jaap Goudsmit initiated and is co-PI of the vaccine course at the T. H. Chan School of Public Health. Jaap Goudsmit co- founded the biotech company Leyden Labs in 2020 and was the founding Chief Scientific Officer from 2020-2025.