by Bill Snyder
Internationally known vaccine experts including Vanderbilt University’s James Crowe Jr., MD, will speak next month at a symposium in Nashville on prospects for a universal flu vaccine.
Vanderbilt University Medical Center and The Human Vaccines Project are among the sponsors of the symposium to be held Nov. 15-16 in the Kimpton Aertson Hotel. It commemorates the centennial of the great influenza pandemic of 1918, which killed an estimated 50 million people worldwide.
Crowe directs the Vanderbilt Vaccine Center. He is co-leading an international effort to develop a universal influenza vaccine that would protect everyone against all strains of the flu anywhere in the world. The effort, called the Universal Influenza Vaccine Initiative, is funded by The Human Vaccines Project.
Other speakers include Gordon Bernard, MD, director of the Vanderbilt Institute for Clinical and Translational Research, Wayne Koff, PhD, president and CEO of The Human Vaccines Project, and former U.S. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, MD, who leads education and health care initiatives at local and global levels.
Nationally known science writers Laurie Garrett and Jon Cohen will moderate the sessions. Other sponsors include the Sabin Vaccine Institute, the Burroughs Wellcome Fund and vaccine manufacturer Sanofi Pasteur.
For more information and to register for the symposium, visit www.humanvaccinesproject.org and click on “talks.”
