Jul 23 2007, 9:15 AM EST
News source: Business Wire
VaxInnate announced today that it has been awarded a 2-year, $597,000 Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant from the National Institutes of Health to support the development of a tetravalent Dengue virus vaccine in collaboration with scientists at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston (UTMB). This SBIR grant award is the result of proof of principle studies completed in a West Nile Virus (WNV) collaboration and recently published in the Journal of Infectious Diseases.
"This grant is yet another significant milestone for VaxInnate, as our technology continues to demonstrate wide-reaching applicability across disease indications in addition to our lead program in influenza vaccines," said Alan Shaw, President and Chief Executive Officer of VaxInnate. "Strong financial support, such as the grant we have received from the NIH, ensures that we are able to continue to develop vaccine programs that will meet global health needs in a very practical and effective way."
"In the past, researchers have faced difficulties in developing a vaccine for Dengue virus, given the four different serotypes of the virus," added Dr. William McDonald, Group Leader of Biochemistry at VaxInnate and Principal Investigator on the grant award. "Protection against one serotype may render the host more susceptible to subsequent infection by another serotype, a situation which may lead to life-threatening Dengue Hemorrhagic Fever. Thus, it is imperative that a vaccine induce protection against all four serotypes of Dengue virus."
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Dengue Fever is the most important mosquito-borne viral disease affecting humans. Dengue virus geographic distribution is similar to that of malaria, and an estimated 2.5 billion people live in areas at risk for epidemic transmission. Currently, there is no available vaccine for Dengue virus infection. People living in Dengue-endemic areas can have more than one dengue infection during their lifetime. Dengue Fever can result in a wide range of symptoms and illnesses ranging from a nonspecific viral syndrome to severe and fatal hemorrhagic disease.
"Dengue fever is the largest cause of hemorrhagic fever in many geographic regions, including the Asia Pacific region and South America. The need to develop a tetravalent vaccine that induces protective immunity simultaneously against the four dengue serotypes has made it quite difficult with currently used technologies to develop an effective vaccine," said David Beasley, Principal Investigator at the University of Texas Medical Branch.
Jeff Powell, Vice President of Research at VaxInnate, added, "The proof of concept studies in the West Nile virus model confirm that our TLR technology has applications in a number of Flavivirus diseases, including Dengue. This funding enables us to utilize this technology to formulate the correct ratio of the different serotypes of Dengue virus proteins to develop a tetravalent vaccine that is effective in controlling a disease that has plagued various parts of the world for decades."
The SBIR grant will be used to support additional pre-clinical research on a Dengue virus vaccine based on the company's TLR platform, as applied to known Dengue virus antigens. VaxInnate's TLR technology platform links vaccine antigen to bacterial flagellin, a component of the long hair-like tails that help bacteria swim and an example of a molecular pattern recognized by TLRs. The vaccines are extremely immunogenic, triggering an innate immune response through the interaction of flagellin with TLR5, which then stimulates a vigorous adaptive immune response to the linked antigen. The method produces robust immune responses in animal models of human and avian influenza virus, West Nile virus, Japanese encephalitis virus, malaria, and other diseases. In addition, recombinant expression of flagellin fusion proteins
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