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Collaboration at the root of vaccine development
When the rollout of COVID-19 vaccines started across the world, many people expressed hesitancy about receiving them, as they were used to a much longer timeline of vaccine development.

More often than not, in the past, the process of developing a vaccine and confirming its safety and effectiveness could take up to 10–15 years.

So, how was it possible to develop, test, and roll out several new vaccines — some of which use novel mRNA technology — in under a year from the start of the pandemic? The answer: interprofessional collaboration and generous funding.

In a talk they gave at the WIRED Health:Tech conference in 2020, both Tal Zaks, then the chief medical officer of Moderna Therapeutics, and Prof. Uğur Şahin, co-founder and CEO of BioNTech, strongly emphasized the importance of interdisciplinary, interprofessional, and interinstitutional collaboration in the fast development and testing of their new vaccines, which were then still at the stage of vaccine candidates.

“The way [in which] the whole industry developed vaccines against COVID-19 […] is the best performance of collaboration,” said Prof. Şahin.

“Moderna teamed up with the NIH [National Institutes of Health], we teamed up with Pfizer, [and] AstraZeneca teamed up with Oxford University. So, there are several models of collaboration, and we have the strongest transparency in the development of a vaccine,” he explained.

This strong collaboration was crucial to being able to develop new candidate vaccines within a matter of months, as a sense of urgency stemmed from the ever-rising number of COVID-19 cases in countries all around the world.

Funding was also key. Although funding bodies usually tend to split their funds a lot more between disciplines and projects, the pandemic made it necessary for more funds to go toward the development of vaccines and drugs that could tackle SARS-CoV-2, which is the virus that causes COVID-19, efficiently.

In the United States, Operation Warp SpeedTrusted Source went full steam ahead to support the development, manufacture, and distribution of COVID-19 vaccines in as little time as possible. In Europe, the European Commission pledged $8 billion to COVID-19 research.

In a guest editorial that appeared in the Journal of Interprofessional Care in August 2020, a team of 11 health experts wrote about how and why interprofessional education and collaborative practice research are especially important during the pandemic.

They also outlined some of the steps and considerations that would be necessary to ensuring constructive interdisciplinary collaboration in a medical research setting.

These include not only combining different types of expertise but also combining methodologies and building teams that are racially, socially, and professionally diverse.

“Inclusive [interprofessional education and collaborative practice] research teams would envision practitioners/clinicians from an array of experiential/applied settings, learners, service users, community members, various academic disciplines, and civil society as partners in all phases of research,” the authors wrote.