Call it serendipity, ‘luck’, or being at the right place at the right time, but Miriam Sturkenboom led the IMI’s project Advance, which built a pan-European safety monitoring network for vaccines. You can’t make it up, but the project ended in March of 2019. Six months later, the world was thrown into chaos with the Wuhan virus, and ADVANCE, rebranded VAC4EU, now finds itself at the centre of a tsunami of vaccine roll-outs and safety studies in Europe.

In this podcast we discuss how VAC4EU is currently active in the study and development of vaccines in the fight against COVID-19. We look back of the history of the project’s development out of the IMI, and the role it’s currently playing in the EU evaluating the performance, safety, and efficacy of the vaccines currently in use or being developed in Europe and internationally.

Miriam is the head of the Department of Data Science and Biostatistics at the University Medical Center Utrecht in the Netherlands. She’s a PhD of Mathematics and Physics, and the past president of the International Society for Pharmacoepidemiology, serving as an expert to the EMA, FDA, WHO and many other organizations.

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