About VMI

Each year, more than a million children die in poor countries from diseases that were eliminated long ago in industrialized nations. Up to 27 million children in those countries do not receive basic vaccines, and millions more are immunized with vaccines that have lost potency.

New vaccines are needed to stem infectious disease outbreaks in these poorer countries and existing vaccines need to be improved. Vaccines are needed that can be used soon after birth, do not require refrigeration and can be delivered without the use of needle injection.


What is VMI?
The Vaccine Modeling Initiative (VMI) is a university-based, international inter-disciplinary research consortium designed to generate new computational models and simulations to improve decision-making in vaccine R&D. These models, based on incidence, prevalence and disease transmission patterns, will help predict and prevent future infectious disease epidemics.

Public health officials across the globe need guidance on which diseases should be priority and the selection of vaccine and epidemic control procedures. By using supercomputers, computational models and simulations can help prioritize vaccine research and control strategies by running worst/best case scenarios based on available data (population size, distribution of certain diseases, likelihood of a particular disease to spread, etc.). These models can give experts guidance on how many deaths could be prevented if a particular vaccine and distribution strategy was employed in a specific area of outbreak.


Which infectious diseases will be the focus of VMI?
VMI will initially focus on dengue and dengue hemorrhagic fever in southeast Asia, measles in central Africa, pandemic flu in Indonesia, and malaria in a region still to be determined. Vaccine models may be developed later in the initiative for pertussis, rotavirus, polio, pneumococcus and tuberculosis.


The VMI Partnership
The Gates Foundation

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has been investing heavily in control of infectious diseases in developing countries. The Gates Foundation has awarded a $10 million grant to the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health and its partners to create computational models and simulations that will help guide the development of new vaccine technologies and epidemic control strategies to stop the spread of infectious diseases.


The Investigators

The three primary investigators of the Vaccine Modeling Initiative have world-class expertise in epidemic theory, field research on infectious diseases, vaccines and computational modeling and simulation. In partnership with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, over the next four years these investigators will use computer simulations of epidemics to evaluate new vaccine technology and optimum ways of providing vaccinations.

  • Donald S. Burke, MD, Principal Investigator, University of Pittsburgh: Dr. Burke is the Dean of the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health, Director of the Pittsburgh Center for Vaccine Research, Associate Vice Chancellor for Global Health, and UPMC-Jonas Salk Chair in Global Health. Dr. Burke is an internationally renowned expert in prevention, diagnosis and control of infectious diseases of global concern. He has authored over 200 scientific publications and has served as consultant to the WHO, Institute of Medicine, UNAIDS and multiple national governments.


  • Neil Ferguson, PhD, Co-Principal Investigator, Imperial College London: Dr. Ferguson is Director of MRC Centre for Outbreak Analysis and Modelling, Department of Infectious Disease Epidemiology at Imperial College London.


  • Bryan Grenfell, PhD, Co-Principal Investigator, Pennsylvania State University: Dr. Grenfell is the Alumni Professor of Biology at the Pennsylvania State University and a Fellow of the Royal Society (the British equivalent of being a member of the National Academies of Science). He and colleagues at the Center for Infectious Disease Dynamics (CIDD) at Penn State have pioneered the field of phylodynamics, which explores the feedback between epidemic dynamics and pathogen evolution at the heart of many disease control problems. He is a consultant to the WHO, CDC and a number of other bodies.


Partner Institutions

  • Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
  • Imperial College London, London, England
  • Johns Hopkins University, Bloomberg School of Public Health, Baltimore Maryland
  • Pennsylvania State University, State College, Pennsylvania
  • Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
  • University of Pittsburgh, Graduate School of Public Health, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
  • World Health Organization, Geneva, Switzerland