What will set Liverpool's Pandemic Institute apart?

The British city of Liverpool is now home to a new Pandemic Institute, which its leader hopes will make a unique contribution to global health and help fill a gap in infectious disease preparedness, even as a proliferation of organizations attempt to tackle the same challenge.

The institute is made up of seven organizations — comprising universities, hospitals, and local government — and plans to train researchers across the global south, particularly in Africa.

While the institute is still in its early stages, Director Matthew Baylis, a professor at the University of Liverpool’s Institute of Infection, Veterinary and Ecological Sciences, sketched out the concept of the new organization. He said it aims to work across five areas related to pandemic disease: to predict, prepare, prevent, respond, and aid recovery.

“We call this an ‘end-to-end’ approach, and we believe we are the only institution offering this very broad ... approach [encompassing] what we can do before a pandemic to what we need to do after a pandemic,” Baylis told Devex.

A “unique structure” that brings in clinicians, academics, and local politicians is “a key part” of the Pandemic Institute’s contribution, according to Baylis. Partners include the University of Liverpool, Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, Liverpool University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, and Liverpool City Council. Despite the local focus, Baylis said the goal is to have a global impact by providing training and resources to researchers in lower-income countries.

As an academic, Baylis said he has the “means to link what I do into hospitals for the clinical impact and also through government into the local community and potentially work with people in the region — who have stepped forward a couple of times already and may be willing to do so again in the future.”

Liverpool was home to a mass COVID-19 testing project starting in November, which led to an estimated 21% fall in cases in the city through mid-December. The pilot was run by the University of Liverpool, the city council, and health agencies.

Partnerships between the different institutions meant Liverpool was “able to respond very quickly when the U.K. government issued the request for trialing mass COVID-19 testing”, said Baylis.

But the work of the Pandemic Institute is not primarily aimed at helping the United Kingdom, he said, adding that he does not want “all significant research” on new infectious diseases emerging in lower-income countries to be done in other parts of the world.

Baylis worked as principal investigator on the One Health Regional Network for the Horn of Africa, a training program aiming to improve research capability, and proposed a similar plan for the Pandemic Institute's work.

“We plan in particular to build capacity amongst local researchers to work in the area of pandemic preparedness ... giving them the opportunity to train and to undertake research in these areas,” Baylis said, adding that these could include surveillance and the development of diagnostics.

“We’re not overly prescriptive at this stage of what research should be done, other than it be in the general area of pandemic preparedness — [and] that can be very broad. And we then work with local researchers to provide them with the training and experience they’re looking for,” he added.

Baylis said he envisions hubs in western, eastern, and southern Africa — potentially followed by Asia, if successful. “I would argue very strongly that the principal beneficiaries here would be the researchers in those countries and countries themselves,” he said.

The institute has been given a grant of £10 million ($14 million) by pharmaceutical company Innova Medical Group, which provided the tests used in Liverpool’s pilot project. Baylis said that he believes the unrestricted funds are purely philanthropic and that a sustainable funding model is still a “work in progress.”

Motivations and contributions vary for the different bodies in the institute's partnership. Hospitals fall into the “respond” category and are hoping to benefit from the establishment of a “human challenge facility [to] accelerate the development of therapeutic drugs or vaccines,” Baylis said. The aim would be to develop these in the event of another pandemic.

“The research we’ll be doing may well be able to feed data or samples into companies which can set up in the region to develop novel diagnostic tests,” he said.

Meanwhile, local and regional governments spy an opportunity to drive local economic growth, according to Baylis, who said that just a week after its Sept. 13 launch, the Pandemic Institute was contacted by companies potentially looking to work with the organization.

“From a commercial point of view, if they can have that opportunity to be at the front of the curve, then they have the opportunity to deliver these things [drugs and vaccines] to the market, but to the benefit of the population. There’s clear relevance to commercial partners from working alongside something like the Pandemic Institute,” he said.

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