Meta Roestenberg | Director, INFECTA & Professor in Vaccine Development, LUMC

Meta Roestenberg is an infectious diseases clinician at Leiden University Medical Center in the Netherlands  where she leads a group of translational researchers in answering key questions related to host-pathogen interaction by making use of controlled human infection models. Her team pioneered the clinical testing of a genetically attenuated sporozoites as vaccines against malaria. As the portfolio of CHIM trials is expanding to include rhinovirus, influenza, RSV, C. difficile, schistosomes, hookworm and OC43, Meta has teamed up with Ingrid de Visser from CHDR to found INFECTA, a not-for-profit CRO for the early-phase clinical testing of novel products for infectious diseases including CHIM studies. INFECTA aims to connect CHIM expertise and make it widely available for the purpose of product registration. Recognising the ethical complexity of such healthy volunteer studies, the group is active in establishing ethical and regulatory frameworks for such CHIM trials, contributing to generating guidelines and leading discussions.