The Pixel Fund has generously donated £10,000 over three years towards Meningitis Now’s research project being carried out at the University of Liverpool.
The project may sound complicated – ‘The preclinical development and evaluation of a vaccine against pneumococcal meningitis and sepsis’ – but essentially the team are seeking to create a more effective vaccine to protect against pneumococcal meningitis, a life-threatening form of bacterial meningitis.
Bacterial meningitis affects thousands of people in the UK each year. One in ten people will die, and at least a third of survivors will be left with lifelong after-effects such as hearing loss, epilepsy or learning difficulties.
The goal of the three-year project, which started in September 2016, is that these preclinical investigations will lead to future testing in human clinical trials, and potentially provide a universal pneumococcal vaccine.
An additional benefit could also see existing vaccines for other types of meningitis improved through the development of novel adjuvants - the boosting agents used in vaccines.
The team is being led by Prof Aras Kadioglu, and includes Dr Marie Yang and Dr Dean Everett, who say that the project has ‘produced encouraging results’.
The research has progressed well and is ahead of schedule in meeting the aims and objectives of the project.
Meningitis Now would like to thank the Pixel Fund for helping to enable this important research to take place, and joining the fight against this devastating disease.
More information at https://www.meningitisnow.org/how-we-help/research/current-research-projects/pneumococcal-meningitis-research-liverpool/.
The research team (from right: PhD student Teerawit Audshasai and postdoctoral researcher Stavros Panagiotou) explaining their work at a visit to the laboratory in October 2018 by Meningitis Now staff and supporters.