The Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development (CVD) earned several recognitions in 2023 resulting from the successful development of CORBEVAX™, its protein subunit COVID-19 vaccine, also known as “The World’s COVID-19 Vaccine.”
CVD Co-Directors, Peter Hotez, MD, PhD, and Maria Elena Bottazzi, PhD, won the 2023 Lyndon B. Johnson Moral Courage Award from Holocaust Museum Houston. This award is given to individuals who work to overcome injustice. Dr. Hotez and Dr. Bottazzi also serve as Dean and Senior Associate Dean, respectively, of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor, and Dr. Bottazzi is the Division Chief of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine.
Dr. Bottazzi and Dr. Hotez received other prestigious honors in 2023 as well. These include the Vilcek-Gold Award for Humanism in Healthcare, which recognizes a foreign-born individual for their extraordinary service to humanity through health care. This award was given to Dr. Bottazzi, who is originally from Honduras. Dr. Hotez received the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Award for Scientific Freedom and Responsibility and the Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA) Anthony Fauci Courage in Leadership Award. Additionally, the Texas Children’s Board of Trustees adopted a resolution honoring Dr. Hotez for his contributions to vaccine development and global health, as well as his defense of vaccine science against a growing anti-vaccine movement.
The CVD team won the David and Beatrix Hamburg Award for Advances in Biomedical Research and Clinical Medicine from the National Academy of Medicine. This award recognized the CVD team for advancing health and the human condition around the world.
The CVD team developed the COVID-19 vaccine prototype in 2021 to serve pediatric and adult populations in low-resource countries whose governments were unable to purchase high-cost, new-technology vaccines to protect against COVID-19. The open-source, patent-free vaccine technology relies on a conventional platform for which local vaccine manufacturers have familiarity, regulatory experience and production capacity. This enabled the vaccine to be scaled and deployed efficiently and affordably. In India, Biological E produced the vaccine under the trademark of Corbevax, and in Indonesia Bio Farma produced a closely related technology that led to the Halal-certified vaccine called Indovac. To date, more than 100 million doses have been administered throughout these countries as primary vaccinations and boosters.
With this success, the CVD continues to advance vaccine science to reach underserved pediatric populations across the globe.
“Our team leveraged decades of learning to accelerate the COVID-19 vaccine program,” Dr. Bottazzi said. “Now, we are looking back and identifying what we learned from this development process to accelerate our emerging or neglected tropical disease portfolio even further.”
Other vaccines are in various phases of production and clinical development and are revealing promising efficacy data for potentially deadly diseases of the developing world, including human hookworm disease, intestinal schistosomiasis and Chagas disease. All are vaccine “firsts.” Additionally, the CVD has developed innovative vaccines for Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) and Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS).
“I am so proud of all the scientists in our center, who have emerged as a vital global force developing new pediatric vaccines for the world’s low- and middle-income countries,” Dr. Hotez said.