The main focus of the research taking place in the Poonawalla Building will be vaccinology and it will house over 300 research scientists
Serum Institute of India CEO Adar Poonawalla. PTI
The Serum Institute of India (SII) has pledged GBP50 million ($66.2 million) to the University of Oxford for setting up the Poonawalla Vaccines Research Building at the University of Oxford.
The investment was made through the Indian company’s SerumLife Sciences unit, Oxford University said on Wednesday.
The Poonawalla Vaccines Research Building will be built on the same site as the recently announced Oxford University Pandemic Sciences Centre, on the University’s Old Road Campus. The buildings will share infrastructure and support facilities for scientific research and academic teaching and together will form a unique hub that will significantly contribute to global pandemic preparedness and responsiveness.
The main focus of the research taking place in the Poonawalla Building will be vaccinology. This new facility will house over 300 research scientists and itself will provide the focus and scale for the university’s major vaccine development programmes allowing a rapid, productive and timely expansion of this fast-growing translational area.
The donation reinforces and builds on the Serum Institute of India’s long-standing partnership with Oxford University. Importantly, the Poonawalla Building will house the headquarters and main laboratory space of the Jenner Institute, the world-leading academic vaccine institute named after Edward Jenner, the father of vaccination. The most recent Serum Institute-Jenner Institute collaboration saw the rapid development and global roll-out of the Oxford/AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine at scale.
Further, Serum Institute-Jenner Institute collaborations include an agreement for Serum Institute to manufacture and develop, with large scale supply, the Jenner Institute’s promising R21/Matrix-M malaria vaccine, currently in Phase III trials, prioritising countries with high malaria burdens.
Professor Louise Richardson, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Oxford, said: ‘The University has longstanding ties with the Poonawalla family and we were delighted to confer an honorary degree on Cyrus Poonawalla in Summer 2019 in recognition of his extraordinary work manufacturing inexpensive vaccines for the developing world. I am delighted that through this generous gift we will be able to further our work on vaccines which have proven so critical to global health. We will also ensure that we are never again caught unprepared for a global pandemic.’
SII was founded in 1966 in the Western Indian city of Pune by Cyrus Poonawalla, son of a horse breeder, and India’s fifth-richest person, according to Forbes. In 2019, Cyrus was also conferred an honorary degree by Oxford University. It is currently run by his son Adar Poonawalla, whose wife Natasha Poonawalla heads Serum Life Sciences.
With input from agencies
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