Dr Jerome Kim, Director General of IVI (left) with Ambassador Juan Carlos CAIZA Rosero from the Colombian Embassy in Korea at IVI Headquarters.

August 6, 2020, SEOUL, South Korea – Ambassador Juan Carlos CAIZA Rosero from the Colombian Embassy in Korea visited the International Vaccine Institute (IVI) today for an overview of IVI’s ongoing COVID-19 vaccine research and development projects, as well as past and present vaccine programs in Colombia and Latin America. Ambassador Caiza then presented on the current COVID-19 situation in Colombia and areas of opportunity for public-private partnership in accelerating solutions for prevention and treatment.

IVI has previously partnered with Colombian institutions for the Dengue Vaccine Initiative (DVI) which concentrated work in two countries including Colombia. DVI was established in 2010 to build on the work of the Pediatric Dengue Vaccine Initiative to further increase awareness of the need to support dengue vaccine development. The goal of the DVI was to accelerate the introduction of safe and broadly protective vaccines into national immunization programs across endemic countries. To that end, IVI and the DVI generated data on the burden of disease, potential private demand, cost of illness and seroprevalence of dengue infection.

Today, IVI is working on a different though similarly devastating viral infection spread by the Aedes mosquito by advancing the development of a Chikungunya vaccine. The IVI-led Global Chikungunya Vaccine Clinical Development consortium will conduct a Phase 2/3 adaptive clinical trial of BBV87, Bharat Biotech’s two-dose live-inactivated vaccine, in Colombia, Panama and Thailand. These trials seek to provide crucial data about the safety and immunogenicity of the vaccine candidate and support use of the vaccine in outbreak settings and endemic countries.