Kai Zheng Leads Data Management in Vaccines for Pandemic Preparedness Center
“We hope to create universal, programmable vaccine platforms that can be rapidly employed ahead of the next outbreak,” said Philip Felgner, director of UC Irvine’s Adeline Yen Mah Vaccine Center, in reference to a $33M grant from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease. The funding supports the UCI Vaccines for Pandemic Preparedness Center (VPPC), which aims to develop agile, safe, effective and accessible vaccines that protect the vulnerable against future pathogens of pandemic importance.
Central to the VPPC project is a well-functioning Data Management Core (DMC) that can provide shared informatics infrastructures and rigid data integrity oversight. Such infrastructures and oversight are key to the quality, efficiency and cost-effectiveness of the VPPC’s data generation and management processes. DMC will help ensure all data, as well as all digital assets created by VPPC — including the associated metadata, documentation, and algorithms and software code — can be readily shared with the scientific community.
Leading the VPPC’s DMC is Kai Zheng, a professor of informatics and emergency medicine and director of the UCI Center for Biomedical Informatics, Institute for Clinical and Translational Science. “We will ensure the timely transfer of high-quality data and will collate information to promptly respond to research inquiries,” says Zheng, who plans to leverage existing research computing resources at UCI, particularly those in the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences (ICS), to reduce redundancy, improve cost-effectiveness, and enable centralized data management and oversight. “We will help design custom informatics solutions for optimized data storage and computing needs, deploy software systems to facilitate consortium-wide project management, and improve regulatory readiness of our vaccine candidates.”
The program’s ambitious goal is to develop rapid-response vaccine platforms targeting viral families that pose significant threats. “We are honored to have been awarded this prestigious grant, alongside a select group of leading vaccine science institutions,” says Felgner, “to tackle scientific challenges in advance and provide a crucial head start in developing vaccines for related pandemic threats.”
— Shani Murray