The University of Oxford has announced a £50 million ($66.6 million) funding commitment from Serum Life Sciences to establish the Poonawalla Vaccines Research Building.

The new building will house the headquarters and main laboratory space of the Jenner Institute — named after Edward Jenner, the father of vaccination — and more than three hundred research scientists, providing focus and scale for the university’s major vaccine development programs. The facility will share infrastructure and support facilities for scientific research and academic teaching with the recently announced Oxford University Pandemic Sciences Centre, and the two facilities will form a hub for advancing global pandemic preparedness and responsiveness.

Serum Life Sciences is wholly owned by the Poonawalla family, owners of the Serum Institute of India, which collaborated with the Jenner Institute on the development and rollout of the Oxford/AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine. Other collaborations include an agreement for SII to manufacture and supply the institute’s R21/Matrix-M malaria vaccine, currently in phase III trials, with priority given to countries with high malaria burdens.

“Vaccines save lives, and the development of vaccines has been the lifelong focus of the Poonawalla family,” said Serum Life Sciences chair Natasha Poonawalla. “We are committed to developing and supplying vaccines to people who need them most. To make this happen, we build many scientific collaborations with the world’s leading research institutes, but today, we are making this keystone donation to give the world-class team at Oxford a brand new facility from which to take their research to the next level.”

(Photo credit: radmi25 via Pixabay)