Frequently Asked Questions
About IVI
The International Vaccine Institute (IVI) is a treaty-based international organization established in 1997 originally as an initiative of the United Nations Development Programme.
Our not-for-profit mission is to discover, develop, and deliver safe, effective, and affordable vaccines—empowering vaccine equity, impact, and sustainability globally.
IVI accelerates vaccine research and development to protect the world’s most vulnerable people from infectious diseases and enable healthy, productive lives.
With an innovative development model and public-private partnerships, IVI focuses on vaccines that are critically needed in resource-limited settings but often overlooked by major commercial developers.
Learn more about our approach.
IVI boasts a diverse, multidisciplinary workforce of biomedical scientists, infectious disease experts, medical doctors and nurses, health economists, vaccine advocates, educators, communicators, and more representing more than 25 nationalities.
Meet our Leadership Team. Explore our career opportunities.
IVI is headquartered in Seoul, Republic of Korea with active field programs and research collaborations in more than 50 countries across six continents. We have a Europe Regional Office in Stockholm, Sweden; an Africa Regional Office in Kigali, Rwanda; a Country Office in Vienna, Austria; and a Country and Project Office in Nairobi, Kenya.
Explore a map of our projects and collaborations.
IVI works closely with governments, vaccine developers and manufacturers, philanthropies and foundations, international organizations and public-private partnerships, policymakers, universities, hospitals, and businesses to make safe, effective, and affordable vaccines available for global public health.
Five governments provide core funding for IVI: The Republic of Korea, Sweden, India, Finland, and Austria. Much of IVI’s work comes from research grants written by scientists at IVI and their collaborators. These grants come from the Gates Foundation, Wellcome, CEPI, the Samsung Life Public Welfare Foundation, and the Korea Support Committee for IVI, as well as academic institutions, industry partners, and individuals.
IVI does not directly fund grants for research and development to other organizations or individuals. However, IVI often awards subcontracts to external collaborators for select projects.
- Antigen discovery, pre-clinical development of new vaccines, development and standardization of laboratory assays in support of vaccine R&D with expertise in molecular, clinical, and translational immunology; vaccine process development; animal studies; and biosafety
- Public health, including epidemiology, interventions and implementation research, policy and health economics, biostatistics, and data management
- Clinical development and operations, and regulatory affairs
Vaccination campaigns and vaccine effectiveness studies - Quality management
- Project and coalition management
- Governmental affairs, communications, and advocacy
IVI is uniquely present at every step of the vaccine value chain. From public health research at field sites around the world to preclinical discovery and development in the lab, clinical trials and efficacy studies, technology transfers and registration with manufacturers, and vaccination campaigns in outbreak settings, IVI is there to make vaccines more available and accessible to the world’s most vulnerable people.
IVI is an international organization like the United Nations or the World Bank. Founded with an establishment agreement at the United Nations in 1997, IVI has more than 40 countries and the WHO as member states, with five countries providing core funding. A representative from each funding member state sits as a voting member on the Board of Trustees.
Learn more about IVI’s member states.
IVI is prohibited from manufacturing vaccines. Instead, we discover new vaccines, improve existing ones, and transfer vaccine technology to manufacturers for vaccine production.
An oral cholera vaccine and typhoid conjugate vaccine were developed in-house at IVI laboratories, and IVI is currently investing in pre-clinical development of two vaccine candidates for non-typhoidal Salmonella and Klebsiella pneumoniae.
In addition to its own vaccines, IVI assists vaccine developers around the world with pre-clinical and clinical vaccine development.
With an initial focus on cholera, typhoid, and dengue, IVI has since expanded disease burden studies and/or vaccine R&D programs to include adenovirus type 55, chikungunya, COVID-19, group A Strep, hantavirus, hepatitis viruses, HIV, human papillomavirus (HPV), MERS, Salmonella, schistosomiasis, severe fever with thrombocytopenia syndrome virus, Shigella, and tuberculosis.
IVI also has a distinct department investigating the impact of antimicrobial resistance on global health with a goal of increasing the available volume of data.
Learn more about IVI’s areas of research.
About vaccines
Vaccines train the body’s immune system to recognize and fight pathogens like viruses and bacteria.
When you receive a vaccine, you introduce your body to a piece of the germ or a version of a germ that won’t harm you but will trigger an immune (or defensive) response. So, if you come across the “real thing” in the future, your body will quickly remember how to protect against the potentially dangerous germ. This is called immunological memory.
Vaccination saves lives. Immunization has saved 154 million lives over the past half century and millions more from illness and disability, according to the WHO. Vaccines have eliminated or eradicated dangerous infectious diseases from significant regions of the global map, protect against cancer, reduce the spread of antimicrobial resistance, and help mitigate the health ramifications of climate change.
Beyond health benefits, vaccination enables children to perform better in school and adults to continue working without the burden of preventable disease. Vaccination also reduces poverty and increases equality and access to opportunities.
Learn more about the value of vaccines.
Vaccines have two major types of ingredients: antigens, which create an immune or “defensive” response in your body by producing protective antibodies, and adjuvants, which help boost that immune response. Other ingredients may be preservatives and residual antibiotics to prevent contamination, and stabilizers to keep vaccines potent after manufacturing.
Vaccine development begins in the lab with scientists creating a vaccine candidate. There are six main types of vaccines: live attenuated (which contain whole bacteria or viruses, though weakened), inactivated (with killed bacteria or viruses, or small parts of them), subunit (which contain only pieces of the bacteria or virus), conjugate (which connect pieces from the bacteria’s coating to antigens), toxoid (which only contain the part of the pathogen that causes disease), and viral vector-based vaccines (which use a harmless virus to deliver genetic code for antigen).
The new vaccine then enters pre-clinical research which includes testing in animals to see if the right kind of immune responses are generated. Then, testing in humans proceeds in three phases:
- Phase I primarily tests for safety while also looking for the antibody responses. This earliest stage of testing in humans recruits a small number of healthy adults.
- Phase II is larger and focuses on the amount of antibody responses. These trials often run for one year or longer, involving hundreds of volunteers, followed by safety analysis.
- Phase III proves that a vaccine is safe and protects against disease. This final stage of clinical testing often involves thousands of people with a portion receiving a placebo.
Following clinical development, results are submitted for extensive review and ultimately approval by a regulatory authority (e.g., MFDS in the Republic of Korea), followed by WHO prequalification.
On a traditional timeline, it takes on average 5-10 years to take a vaccine from the laboratory to a vaccination program. Every stage from discovery through regulatory review can take at least two years, sometimes up to five. Once a vaccine proves to be safe and effective, building the manufacturing capacity to make enough vaccine also takes time.
Unlike antibiotics, viruses and bacteria very infrequently become resistant to established vaccines. In the case of influenza (the flu), vaccine strains appear to change yearly through mutation or with new strains around the world and vaccine has to be adapted to the circulating strains every year.
However, most other vaccines do not experience major problems with resistance. The graphic below shows the time to detection of resistance to antimicrobials (in red) and to vaccines (in green). Source: Front. Immunol.
Vaccines are a sustainable solution to disease prevention and are sometimes used for large outbreaks of multidrug resistant bacteria, like Salmonella Typhi.
On the other hand, increasing resistance to antibiotics has become a major threat to global health, exacerbated by overuse and misuse of antibiotics. Vaccination is an important tool against antimicrobial resistance by preventing infection in the first place and reducing (mis)use of antibiotics.