A Covid-19 learning
By Nathalie Garçon, CEO/CSO BIOASTER
The current crisis reminds us today of the absolute and universal need to prepare in advance for such epidemics, which no one can guarantee will never happen again.
History has also shown that it can be difficult to predict, as soon as a new pathogen emerges, the extent of its health impact on the world’s population.The collective response to such threats is measured by speed of action, agility, resilience and our ability to move quickly and efficiently from the idea to the diagnosis for everyone, vaccine for all and treatments for those affected.
Academic research provides avenues of work for which it is necessary and will be necessary to implement technological innovations to make scientific discoveries rapidly industrializable.
Global health approach – human and animal health – to fight, contain and treat epidemics requires a proactive approach of technological solutions adapted to the emergency and sized to the real need, allowing rapid deployment and care to a global world.
This conviction defined my professional, academic and industrial life through the development of many vaccines, and also through BIOASTER, Foundation for Scientific Cooperation, designed to respond to these new problems, contributing to industrial efforts to allow the emergence of new solutions for everyone.
We have organized ourselves, as to, in the coming weeks and months to come, our unique model of collaboration, our experts, resources, infrastructures, laboratories and innovative technologies contribute via collaborative or internal projects to attenuate the wave that strikes us today, and control the next one.
We are ready and determined that such unpredictable crises can be controlled, limited and prevented through new prophylactic, diagnostic, therapeutic and vaccine tools and solutions capitalizing on academic research, technological innovation, partnership with businesses, but above all, by the desire to innovate, together.
Nathalie Garçon
Nathalie Garçon, PharmD, PhD,
Previously, Nathalie Garçon was Vice President and Head of Global Adjuvant Centre for Vaccine Development at GSK Biologicals. Following the successful completion of two PhDs, one in biological pharmacy and the other in immunotoxicology and immunopharmacology, Dr Garçon moved to the UK for 1 year as a postdoctoral research fellow at the Royal Free Hospital in London, undertaking research on liposomes in vaccines.
She then moved to the USA where she spent 4 years at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, first as a postdoctoral research fellow, then as assistant professor, working on vaccine delivery systems and immunopotentiators.
Dr Garçon joined SmithKline Beecham Biologicals now GlaxoSmithKline Biologicals in 1990, where she set up and led the vaccine adjuvant and formulation group. She moved from this position, to head of technologies, head of research, head of global research and north America RD; to her current position as head of the global adjuvants and delivery systems center for vaccines. She provides leadership within GSK Biologicals in the field of adjuvants, from discovery to registration and commercialisation of adjuvanted vaccines. Dr Garçon’s expertise in vaccinology extends from research to manufacturing, in particular immunology, adjuvant and formulation technologies, analytical methods, animal experimentation and toxicology/safety evaluation and testing. She has authored over 40 papers and book chapters, and holds more than 200 patents.
Dr Garçon is the 2014 S. Plotkin award for life time contribution in vaccines and vaccine technologies.
Dr Garçon is the CEO and CSO of BIOASTER since 2014