A Shot at Change: The Making of a Vaccine

In the West African country of Burkina Faso in the 1980s, an 18-year-old boy is killed in the road. Why? A case of meningitis. The meningitis epidemic in Sub-Saharan Africa spurred a global race to find a vaccine, led by the founding of the Meningitis Vaccine Project (MVP). This network of doctors, vaccine developers, public health officials, and UN workers converged to develop an inexpensive vaccine – without Big Pharma. Instead, they built teams as an ecosystem of thriving partnerships. In this episode of Teamistry, we hear from the original MVP team and how they persevered despite enormous challenges. Dr. Samba Sow, Director General of the Centre for Vaccine Development in Mali, Dr. Suresh Jhadav, Executive Director of the Serum Institute of India and Dr. Marc LaForce, then Director of the Meningitis Vaccine Project. We also hear from Dr. Ngozi Erondu, an infectious disease specialist who explains MVP's legacy in building "South-South" collaborations, and Dr. Mark Alderson, project leader at PATH, describes how the team brought the vaccine from labs in one part of the globe to clinics in another. Teamistry is an original podcast from Atlassian. For more on the series, go to https://www.atlassian.com/blog/podcast.