Brown Partners With Insight Therapeutics to Research Flu Vaccines for Elderly
Monday, December 16, 2019
Brown University researchers have partnered with Virginia-based Insight Therapeutics to identify the most effective flu vaccines for elderly nursing home residents.
Of the tens of thousands of U.S. residents who die from influenza each year, some 80 to 90 percent are age 65 or older, according to Stefan Gravenstein, principal investigator of the research at Brown.
“Nursing homes are a particularly useful environment to conduct research because the people there are older and more vulnerable. When you have something that is out there for public use, like all of the vaccines involved in our studies, it’s important to figure out which interventions help this especially frail population most in clinically meaningful ways, such as keeping them out of the hospital," said Gravenstein.
GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLASTBrown and Insight Therapeutics, a private company that focuses on the healthcare of older adults, reached a three-year, $2.1 million agreement.
“Insight Therapeutics welcomes the partnership with Brown. Our knowledge of the long-term care environment at the ground level meshes well with Brown’s intellectual resources and provides an efficient platform for large-scale trials like this one,” said Insight Therapeutics cofounder Ed Davidson.
The Study
According to Gravenstein, the study will compare two licensed, safe and effective vaccines — an egg-free recombinant flu vaccine and a traditional flu vaccine where seasonal influenza viruses are mass-produced in chicken eggs and then inactivated — in up to 1,000 nursing homes each in this and the next flu season.
“There are three parts to this: efficiency, scale, and clinical relevance. Brown has the infrastructure and intellectual resources to look not just at large datasets but large data that is specific to long-term care,” said Gravenstein.
The Brown research team will use Medicare claims data and a dataset that measures quality of care at nursing homes on a quarterly basis to track the long-term outcomes after offering one of the two vaccines to their residents.
Those outcomes will include, for example, residents being hospitalized for respiratory illnesses, or for any reason, for at least two years following vaccination.
According to Gravenstein, the study design will allow the team to efficiently study tens of thousands of elderly individuals in nursing homes — a clinically relevant context.
Getting answers about the comparative effectiveness of different flu vaccines can inform public health decision-making.
Brown Research Team
The Brown research team includes Vince Mor, Issa Dahabreh, Pedro Gozalo, Nina Joyce, Kevin McConeghy, Patience Moyo, Orestis Panagiotou, Theresa Shireman and Andrew Zullo, primarily in the Center for Gerontology and Health Care Research; and David Canaday and Elie Saade, both at Case Western Reserve University.
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