Public consultation on new building at Old Road Campus
The University has launched the public consultation on its plans to create a major new facility to host pandemic and vaccine research at Old Road Campus (ORC).
Staff, students and members of the public are welcome to provide their views on the proposals, which will be taken into consideration in preparing the final design ahead of a planning application submission in April 2024.
Any comments, questions or other feedback on the proposals should be emailed to oxfordplanning@savills.com. You can also share your views using the online feedback form. The deadline for responses is Wednesday 20 December 2023.
The facility will host both the University’s long-established Jenner Institute and the new Pandemic Sciences Institute to form a world-leading research centre dedicated to both new vaccine design and development and to confronting the challenges of pandemic and epidemic infectious diseases.
The Pandemic Sciences Institute is saving lives and livelihoods worldwide by translating cutting-edge science into practical solutions including new digital tools, diagnostic methods, treatments and vaccines. The Jenner Institute, one of the largest academic vaccine institutes globally, has designed and developed licensed vaccines against both Covid-19 and malaria in the last three years. Oxford’s research activities in vaccinology cover a wide range of human and veterinary diseases and bring together investigators who are designing and developing numerous vaccines to generate an exceptional breadth of scientific know-how and critical mass.
The building extends the world-class biomedical research that already takes place around the campus, bringing together scientists from vaccine and pandemic research groups within the University’s Medical Sciences Division in order to foster interdisciplinary collaboration and innovation.
The building has received significant philanthropic funding from the Poonawalla Family and Serum Life Sciences, with whom the University has a deep partnership in relation to vaccines work. The part of the facility that conducts vaccines research will be known as the Cyrus Poonawalla Vaccines Research Building.
The design provides around 9,600m2 of high-quality laboratory and office space over three floors and basement, as well as landscaped surroundings that will provide the campus with open amenity space where staff and students can eat, drink and socialise.
The new building will fill one of the last remaining vacant plots on the ORC, designated plot B2 in the site masterplan, which received outline planning permission in 2013. It will sit on the northern edge of the site, next to the recently completed Institute of Developmental and Regenerative Medicine (IDRM). It will replace the New Richards Building, a temporary structure that is at the end of its useful life.
More information on the proposed development is available in the information boards that the design team have prepared for the consultation.
