NIAID funding to support further characterization work.
DOR BioPharma was awarded two additional grants from the NIAID totaling approximately $5.3 million to support the development of its biodefense vaccine programs. One grant of approximately $4.8 million was awarded for the continued development of RiVax™, a recombinant vaccine against ricin toxin. The second grant of approximately $0.5 million was awarded to continue additional research on the development of BT-VACC™, a multivalent mucosal vaccine against botulinum toxin.
The RiVax™ grant is over a three-year period and will fund the development of animal models that will be used to correlate human immune response to the vaccine with protective efficacy in animals. This new grant also supports the further biophysical characterization of the vaccine containing a well-characterized adjuvant that is needed to enhance the immune response to recombinant proteins.
DOR’s second grant will be used to conduct further work to combine antigens from different serotypes of botulinum toxin for a prototype multivalent vaccine. The grant funding will support further work in characterizing antigen formulations that induce protective immunity to the three most common botulinum toxin types that may be encountered naturally or in the form of a bioweapon.
