Oxford was awarded £ 50m by the Serum Institute owners at a new vaccine testing center

The owners of the Serum Institute of India, the world’s largest vaccine maker, are donating £ 50m to Oxford University to build the new Jenner Institute, where the Oxford-AstraZeneca Covid vaccine was developed.

Offering of a Looking after the family will enable the council to increase the number of pre-vaccination staff receiving treatment from 300 scientists and expand its range of activities, says Jenner CEO Adrian Hill.

“In his words, this free gift will give us an opportunity,” he said. “We moved into our modern home in 2008. Thirteen years later, we are still young, and we have applied for a new place. Now we can meet again and share what we know easily. ”

The new Poonawalla Vaccines Research Building will be on the Old Road Campus of the university in Headington, the same site as planned for the £ 500m Pandemic Sciences Center announced by Oxford earlier this year. The builder has not yet been selected.

Adar Poonawalla, head of the Serum Institute, said his company “began collaborating on promising vaccine candidates with Professor Hill and colleagues a few years ago but our collective work has apparently increased significantly due to the coronavirus epidemic. skills in our Indian and UK teams to a certain degree. ”

The Serum Institute has developed hundreds of millions of Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccines, mainly for distribution in developing countries.

The next major partnership between Jenner and the Serum Institute is expected to focus on developing a malaria vaccine that has given hope. clinical results in April. If this is confirmed by a larger survey next year, the Serum Institute will produce more than 200m per year at its plant in Pune.

But Hill said £ 50m to build the new building would be provided by Poonawallas through his UK-based company, Serum Life Sciences, and not business finance.

Most of the research that has taken place in this building can be funded by government agencies and charities such as the UK Research and Innovation, Wellcome and Gates Foundation. “All we have to do is look at the things that are most at risk with the new technology,” Hill said.

Separately, the Serum Institute announced in May that it would invest £ 240m in UK life sciences. In September it paid £ 50m at a cost of 3.9% at Oxford BioMedica, a company that played a key role in the production of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine.

Poonawallas is not the first billions of Indians to donate to the Oxford vaccine project. In July 2020 Lakshmi Mittal and his family presented the university professor with a vaccine, a position currently held by Hill, with a prize of $ 3.5m.

Care provided to Oxford Medical Sciences during the epidemic, from vaccination to clinical trials of Covid drugs, has helped the university raise funds, Hill said.

In January the drug group Ineos donated £ 100m to set up an antibiotic research agency in Oxford, with GSK announcing a £ 30m fee for medical research earlier this month.