Kansas University has been awarded a five-year, $6.85 million research contract with the goal of boosting the effectiveness and safety of vaccines that treat infectious diseases.
The contract, announced Nov. 12, is with the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Disease and is one of six awarded to universities around the country for similar research.
Researcher Sunil David is leading the project at KU, along with Apurba Dutta. Both are associate professors of medicinal chemistry.
Their team hopes to find ways of making existing and future vaccines more potent but with fewer side effects. To do that, they are looking for specific chemical agents — called adjuvants — that trigger responses in the human immune system when added to a vaccine.