Guests: Pete Bak and Christian Thienel

Length: 37 minutes

With the advent of COVID-19 in 2020 and 2021, we saw a tremendous amount of interest in not only COVID vaccines, but other companies riding the tailwind and developing vaccine therapies that span across viral illness, maternal infections and bacterial infections.

In this episode resident immunologist Dr. Pete Bak and Christian Thienel discuss vaccine technology, up-and-coming areas of interest, such as RSV, and the vaccines currently in late-stage clinical development.

Topics in this podcast include:

• Vaccine technology, vaccine types and their varying levels of durability
• The ongoing interest of vaccine development for RSV, including data from GSK’s Arexvy and Pfizer’s Abrysvo vaccines
• How recommendations from the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) influence commercial dynamics
• The interesting chess game of scheduling vaccines as they relate to COVID, flu and RSV (seasonality versus strains and antigens) 
• Vaccine development and data as it applies to Cytomegalovirus (CMV) and Epstein-Barr (EBV)
• News from the bacterial front: MinervaX leading the way with a maternal vaccine against Group B streptococcus infections with a very large series B round for $54M; Pfizer’s recent Prevnar 20 against pneumococcal pneumonia
• Pricing, reimbursement and the interplay with ACIP guidelines

As always, we welcome listener questions and/or topics you’d like to learn more about.

You can listen to previous episodes here or submit your inquiries here.