Prof Meta Roestenberg
Founder & CEO, Infecta
Dr Ingrid de Visser-Kamerling
Founder & COO, Infecta
The COVID-19 pandemic exposed how vulnerable the world remains to infectious diseases. Faster, more efficient clinical development pathways accelerate access to vaccines and therapeutics.
Infectious diseases continue to disproportionately affect low- and middle-income countries, where healthcare, diagnostics and treatment access are often limited, and healthcare systems are more vulnerable to disruption.
Product development challenges
Despite the urgent need for new vaccines and therapeutics, infectious disease product development remains challenging. Scientific uncertainty is high, clinical research is expensive and development timelines are long.
Funding can also be difficult to secure, particularly because many infectious diseases predominantly affect populations with limited purchasing power, reducing commercial incentives despite immense societal need. As a result, even promising interventions take too long to develop, remain costly to test and fail to reach the populations that need them most.
Large-scale field trials often require thousands of participants and take years before researchers know whether a product is effective. Fluctuating infection rates, complex logistics and limited research infrastructure in high-burden regions delay studies further, increasing costs and slowing access to life-saving interventions.
Despite the urgent need for new vaccines
and therapeutics, infectious disease product
development remains challenging.
CHIM studies
INFECTA was established to accelerate early clinical development for infectious diseases products through Controlled Human Infection Models (CHIMs). Healthy adult volunteers are carefully exposed to a well-characterised pathogen under highly controlled clinical conditions. This allows researchers to study infections and evaluate vaccines or therapeutics much earlier in clinical development.
CHIMs can generate early clinical data on immune responses, pathogen behaviour, dose-response, safety and preliminary efficacy in a fraction of time required for traditional field trials. Insights that normally emerge later in development can become available far earlier, enabling faster and more informed decision-making.
Early data access also allows products to be adapted or optimised before large-scale trials begin, reducing uncertainty and costly late-stage failures. Because not every infectious disease is suitable for a CHIM, INFECTA also supports conventional phase one clinical studies and invests in biomarkers and translational methodologies that strengthen early infectious disease research more broadly.
Ultimately, the goal is to improve how infectious disease interventions are developed so that effective vaccines and therapeutics can reach high-burden populations faster and more affordably.
