Oxford receives £50m from Serum Institute owners for vaccine research centre

The owners of the Serum Institute of India, the world’s largest vaccine manufacturer, are giving £50m to Oxford university to build a new home for the Jenner Institute, where the Oxford-AstraZeneca Covid vaccine was developed.

The donation by the Poonawalla family will enable the institute to double its workforce doing pre-clinical vaccine research to 300 scientists and to expand its range of projects, said Jenner director Adrian Hill.

“In a word, this generous gift will give us space,” he said. “We moved into our current home in 2008. Thirteen years later, it is really cramped, and we’ve also begged and borrowed space elsewhere. Now we’ll be able to come together again and share our knowhow more easily.” 

The new Poonawalla Vaccines Research Building will be on the university’s Old Road Campus in Headington, the same site as a planned £500m Pandemic Sciences Centre announced by Oxford this year. An architect has not yet been appointed.

Adar Poonawalla, chief executive of the Serum Institute, said his company “began collaborating on promising vaccine candidates with Professor Hill and his colleagues several years ago but our work together has obviously risen to prominence as a result of the coronavirus pandemic. With that, we took our exchange of knowledge, skills and capabilities across our respective teams in India and the UK to another level.” 

The Serum Institute has manufactured hundreds of millions of doses of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine, mainly for distribution to poorer countries.

The next big collaboration between the Jenner and the Serum Institute is expected to focus on manufacturing a malaria vaccine that received very promising clinical trial results in April. If these are confirmed in a larger study next year, the Serum Institute will make more than 200m doses a year at its plant in Pune.

But Hill said the £50m capital endowment for the new building would be a philanthropic donation by the Poonawallas through their UK company, Serum Life Sciences, and not a business investment.

Most research carried out in the building is likely to be funded by public and charitable bodies such as UK Research and Innovation, Wellcome and the Gates Foundation. “What we should be doing is exploring very high-risk things with new technologies,” Hill said.

Separately, the Serum Institute announced in May that it would invest £240m in UK life sciences. In September, it paid £50m for a 3.9 per cent stake in Oxford BioMedica, a company that played a critical role in manufacturing the AstraZeneca vaccine.

The Poonawallas are not the first Indian billionaires to donate to the Oxford vaccine effort. In July 2020, Lakshmi Mittal and his family endowed the university’s professorship in vaccinology, the post currently held by Hill, with a £3.5m gift.

The attention given to medical science at Oxford during the pandemic, from vaccine development to running clinical trials of Covid drugs, has helped the university raise funds, Hill said.

In January, chemicals group Ineos donated £100m to set up an antibiotics research institute at Oxford, while GlaxoSmithKline announced a £30m investment in pharmaceutical research there this month.