Simon Draper, Professor of Vaccinology and Translational Medicine at the University of Oxford, has made world-leading contributions in one of the most challenging of all biomedical disciplines: the development of anti-parasitic subunit vaccines for humans. He was centrally involved in the development of viral-vectored vaccines, providing much of the foundational work that led to the use of this delivery system which has been successful for viral vaccines including in the recent Covid-19 pandemic. His research spans the full breadth of the discipline ranging from organising human clinical trials, identifying subunit vaccine targets, and detailed molecular mechanistic studies.
His research has reignited a genuine hope that a highly effective subunit blood stage vaccine candidate for malaria might be achievable.