How British research could hold the key to taming Monkeypox

As the country wound down for the long bank holiday weekend, Professor Jonathan Heeney was juggling a mountain of work in Cambridge. “The thing is, what we’re doing is really timely,” he says. 

For years, Heeney and his team at biotech company DIOSynVax had been working on creating a vaccine suitable for three infectious viruses – ebola, lassa and marburg. But as monkeypox cases started to pick up around the world, the virus that DIOSynVax and researchers from the University of Cambridge had based their jab on was drawing attention. 

“Just like Oxford chose to use a chimpanzee adenovirus for their Covid vaccine, we chose a weakened smallpox vaccine to carry the payload for all these hemorrhagic fever viruses. And so, we would not only be able to vaccinate against lassa, ebola and marburg, but also fortuitously monkeypox,” says Prof Heeney.

With positive monkeypox cases spreading worldwide, focus is turning to what approach countries should take — and the role of vaccines. The World Health Organisation (WHO) has said Europe is now at the “epicentre of the largest and most geographically widespread monkeypox outbreak ever reported outside of endemic areas in western and central Africa”. 

Yet, so far, it adds, “monkeypox has not been at the forefront of research and development in the field of infectious diseases”. Britain has bought more than 20,000 doses of a smallpox vaccine in the scramble to secure supplies to inoculate those at risk.

In the background, however, work has been underway in Britain on research which insiders say could hold the key to entirely stamping out such viruses.

Last Monday, officials from InnovateUK were on the phone with Heeney. The government funding arm recently handed his project another £500,000 to expand its vaccine project to protect against four fevers plus monkeypox, on top of a previous £2.3m grant.

“We want to do this as fast as possible,” says Heeney. “We want to get our vaccine into the countries where monkeypox is a real problem.”

DIOSynVax’s potential, he says, is significant – not just for monkeypox but the other viruses, too. Its vaccine work was recently expanded to see if the jab could be used for a fourth virus – Crimean-Congo haemorrhagic fever. 

“We’d only have to make one vaccine for all those viruses, and vaccinate people once or twice with it, rather than having to keep launching different campaigns. It would be cheaper and, simply, more effective.”

Some within the scientific community are sceptical. Clive Dix, the former chair of the UK vaccine taskforce, argues the chances of success in making a virus to tackle three or four different things appear “very slim”.

“The issues of developing it are horrendous, because if you have a vaccine, you need to show it works and get it approved. Well you’d need to show it works against all the things you’re trying to get approved for. These have to be full scale trials, so doing that multiple times over, you’re talking 20-year development plans.”

The question of funding is central. Heeney may be optimistic the rise in monkeypox cases could help his company secure more funding, yet not everyone is convinced.

“Current smallpox vaccines are something like 85pc effective against monkeypox,” says Paul Hunter, professor in medicine at the University of East Anglia. “That’s pretty damn good. We could spend a lot of time, effort and money, and two years down the line have a specific monkeypox vaccine, and it’s no better than what we’ve got at the moment.”

While DIOSynVax’s jab is intended to help multiple viruses, experts argue funding for vaccine development in any form remains a major issue. 

“A key question is, where is the pull at the other end of the market?” says Professor Andrew Pollard, of the Oxford Vaccine Group. “There is a question about the incentive for a commercial manufacturer to actually make a vaccine if it’s not going to be used. 

“Obviously, from a pandemic preparedness perspective, we need to work out how to make vaccines for these diseases, because we may need them in the future, like for Covid. But there’s still a practical issue of the financial model. Who is funding this?”

Still, there are pockets of scientific progress in Britain which could make a major difference to stamping out diseases such as monkeypox, even without huge investment and lengthy development periods.