Vaccine Development Process Map

Using the process map in an outbreak situation: case studies

The online Vaccine Development Toolkit presents a generic process map from which scientist engaged in vaccine research may wish to consult as they consider the development and clinical evaluation of a candidate vaccine.

The Toolkit has identified several bottlenecks during discovery and development and in order to test its applicability, three candidate vaccines were evaluated against the process map to verify if the bottlenecks identified were true in these worked examples and to understand how the total number of bottlenecks changed. In general, for a platform process there are few bottlenecks when compared with a new product/vaccine – which the tool correctly verified.

As the UK Vaccine Network was convened in the wake of the Ebola outbreak in 2014, an important remit has been to consider R&D for outbreak vaccines, and how this process might be shaped during an epidemic or pandemic.

The UKVN have discussed which bottlenecks exist for three worked examples: