The first Phase 3 COVID-19 vaccine trials are expected to report their results in the next few months. The majority of these Phase 3 trials are being conducted in upper–middle or high–income countries and in specific target populations – most often young adults.   

One major concern about the trials planned and underway is the relevance of their study results for low-resource settings – in other words, whether criteria relevant for low- and middle-income country contexts have been taken into account when planning these studies and determining how to define a “successful” vaccine.  

Understanding the generalizability of trial data and the applicability of available vaccines will be important for low- and middle-income countries to make informed decisions about the best vaccines for large–scale use in their populations.  

Watch the recording

In this webinar co-organized by the COVID-19 Clinical Research Coalition and the Mahidol-Oxford Research Unit, leading vaccine experts will:  

• summarise the main vaccine trial designs;  
• discuss how trial designs affect generalizability;  
• talk about vaccine trial design issues relevant for low-resource settings; and  
• consider the impact of trial design on regulatory approval and vaccine acceptability

Moderator: Dr James Watson, Mahidol Oxford Tropical Medicine Research Unit, UK & Co-Chair of the coalition’s Study Design & Analytics Working Group 

Speakers:

• Dr Rebecca Kahn, Harvard University, USA
• Dr Rebecca Grais, Epicentre, France  
• Prof. Gagandeep Kang, Christian Medical College, Vellore, India & Steering Committee Member of the COVID-19 Clinical Research Coalition 

More information

Dr James Watson is a statistician and data analyst at MORU, Bangkok. His background is Mathematics and Computer Science (undergraduate) and Bayesian Statistics (DPhil). For the last 5 years he has worked as a postdoctoral researcher at MORU with a focus on clinical trial design for multiple tropical diseases, including malaria, snakebite envenoming, and Chagas disease.

Dr Rebecca Kahn is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. After graduating with a BA in Public Policy and Global Health from Duke University, she worked with the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief in the U.S. State Department’s Office of the Global AIDS Coordinator. She then worked for Partners In Health in Sierra Leone on the Ebola response and health systems strengthening programs. She earned her MS in Epidemiology in 2018 and her PhD in Population Health Sciences and Epidemiology in 2020 from Harvard. Her research focuses on using infectious disease modeling to enhance epidemic preparedness and response.

Dr Rebecca Freeman Grais is the Director of Research at Epicentre, an epidemiology and research satellite created by Médecins Sans Frontières, an international medical humanitarian organization. Her primary areas of research focus on the prevention of infectious diseases, tropical diseases and emerging infections in Sub-Saharan Africa. She has particularly focused on population-based studies of the effectiveness of public health interventions and efficacy trials of novel vaccines and therapeutic agents. She serves on various international advisory committees, scientific committees, DSMBs and collaborations aimed at conducting research in conflict and low-resourced settings.

Professor Gagandeep Kang is Professor at the Wellcome Trust Research Laboratory, and the Division of Gastrointestinal Sciences at the Christian Medical College (CMC) in Vellore. Professor Kang conducts inter-disciplinary research on enteric infections and child health. Her team has evaluated vaccines in pre-clinical and clinical phase 1-3 studies for rotavirus and cholera. She is a member of many WHO advisory committees, is the vice-Chair of the Board of Coalition of Epidemic Preparedness Innovations and chairs the Immunization Technical Advisory Group for the WHO’s South East Asian Region.