Wolfson Researcher Secures £4.3m for Vaccine Research

Dr Kim, along with Professor Sir Andrew Pollard, has secured three substantial grants (a total of £4.3M) from SBRI Innovate UK to develop new vaccines against plague, Q fever and alphaviruses. This research will be funded by the Department of Health and Social Care as part of the UK Vaccine Network (UKVN), a UK Aid programme to develop vaccines for diseases with epidemic potential in low and middle-income countries (LMICs).

Dr Kim is leading these projects with his team of postdocs, research assistants and DPhil students at the Oxford Vaccine Group (OVG) under the direction of Prof Sir Andrew Pollard. He has also just begun work to develop a vaccine against Chagas disease, with funding from Medical and Life Sciences Translational Fund (MLSTF).

“I am thrilled to receive these awards to develop new vaccines against these pathogens,” said Dr Kim. “This funding will allow us to accelerate our efforts in developing affordable and accessible vaccines that are well-suited for outbreak prevention and general immunisation in low-and-middle-income countries”.

Dr Kim has previously been the recipient of a Sir Henry Wellcome Fellowship, an MRC HIC-VAC pump-priming grant, and an MRC Impact Accelerator Account (IAA) grant as a Principal Investigator. To find out more about Dr Kim’s work, you can listen to his recent appearance on Wolfson’s Pivot Points podcast.

In addition to being a Research Fellow here at Wolfson, Dr Kim is a Sir Henry Wellcome Fellow, a Principal Investigator at the Oxford Vaccine Group, a Lecturer in Medicine at Somerville College, and a doctor in Internal Medicine at the Oxford University Hospitals NHS Trust.