Six takeaways from VED 2025

The world looks decidedly different than it did when the last Vaccines for Enteric Diseases (VED) Conference was held in 2019. For instance, in a post-COVID world, people have a better understanding about the importance of handwashing for disease prevention and how face masks and vaccination can prevent illness.

While some of these shifts have had a positive impact on preventing diarrhea, there is still much work to be done. And, if the packed agenda at VED 2025 last week was any indication, there’s a lot happening around vaccines against diarrheal diseases!

I learned a great deal at VED 2025 and appreciated the opportunity to talk with many of these enteric researchers. Here are my top takeaways:

1. Climate change is worsening diarrheal disease. This point was made in the opening plenary by Duncan Steele of the Gates Foundation, and it echoed throughout the rest of the conference. It’s clear that we can’t think about the future of enteric diseases without considering climate change.

2. On a related note, cholera has seen a resurgence in recent years, placing a strain on limited vaccine supplies and indicating the importance of developing additional vaccines. Several next-generation candidates are in development, and a presentation by Godfrey Bwire from Uganda’s Ministry of Health was a bright spot as he highlighted his country’s progress in eliminating cholera.

3. Shigella vaccine research is another area that has shown significant progress. The Enterics for Global Health (EFGH) Consortium is conducting a Shigella surveillance study in seven countries to inform future vaccine trial designs and prepare sites to rapidly implement such studies. This will be hugely helpful for several candidates quickly moving through the pipeline and gearing up for clinical trials.

4. A robust session on combination vaccines demonstrated the promise and challenges of developing new combination vaccines for enteric diseases. With increasingly crowded immunization schedules, it’s clear that combination vaccines will be an important way to add many of these new antigens to childhood vaccination efforts in the future.

5. There’s a lot of cool new science happening in this field! Promising preclinical research on developing a vaccine for C. difficile (a bacterium that causes an infection of the colon), the search for protective antibodies for norovirus, a more practical and sustainable method for gathering stool samples for diarrheal surveillance, and oodles of research on novel adjuvants to improve vaccine performance were just a few of the interesting presentations I saw.  

6. Finally, Gothenburg, Sweden is a lovely location for a conference in June! The beautiful weather, delicious seafood, and “fika”—the social Swedish coffee break— made it an idyllic place to spend three days learning about new enteric vaccine research. The University of Gothenburg and others in the region have a tremendous amount of research happening on enterics, so this location provided a great opportunity to hear first-hand about their work.

Cover photo: Scenes from the 2025 Vaccines for Enteric Diseases (VED) conference in Gothenburg, Sweden. Credit: Allison Clifford.