BEIJING - As infectious diseases spread across borders, vaccination becomes an important policy for safeguarding public health. One country alone cannot manage all aspects of vaccine quality assurance. Working together, three WHO collaborating centres for standardization and evaluation of vaccines – the National Institutes for food and Drug Control (NIFDC) in China, the National Institute of infectious Diseases (NIID) in Japan, and National Institute of Food and Drug Safety Evaluation (NIFDS) in the Republic of Korea – have embarked on a tripartite collaboration on vaccine development and quality assurance.
With support from WHO Regional Office for the Western Pacific and headquarters, this tripartite collaboration includes a symposium to facilitate information exchange and exchange of scientists visiting for development of common regulatory standards and scientific research agenda across national control laboratories.
The third symposium was hosted by NIFDC in Beijing, China in 2017. At the symposium, the centres reported key achievements. Together, they will advance these achievements, including:
- Hand, foot and mouth disease: China Food and Drug Administration (CFDA) has approved three Enterovirus 71 (EV71) vaccines against hand, foot and mouth disease (HFMD). HFMD is a common illness that mainly affects infants and children, with a high burden in China. NIFDC has undertaken lot release of the vaccine and requested that WHO develop guidelines on the quality, safety and efficacy of EV71 vaccines.
- Polio: NIID develops and characterizes reference standards to determine the potency of Sabin strain-derived inactivated poliomyelitis virus vaccine (sIPV). This helps to determine the dosage that should be used in a vaccine. The first sIPV-containing diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis combination vaccine was licensed in Japan in 2012.
- Influenza: NIFDS has been working on a rapid assay to quantify influenza haemagglutinin (HA) antigen by high performance liquid chromatography (HLPC) assays. If there is pandemic influenza, the rapid assay will significantly shorten the time for evaluation of vaccine potency.
- Pneumonia: NIFDS has also developed a reference sera panel on pneumococcal vaccines. The sera panel will support clinical evaluation of new pneumococcal vaccines.
The fourth symposium will be held in 2019. In the meantime, the WHO collaborating centres will work together on issues raised during the third symposium and facilitated by WHO.
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WHO collaborating centres supporting safe vaccines