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July 24, 2007 – The National Institutes of Health (NIH) have awarded Vaxinnate, a U.S. biotech firm, with $597,000 to support the development of the firm’s tetravalent Dengue fever vaccine. Vaxinnate uses innovative TLR technology to produce the vaccine, which may be the first and only vaccine quite of this nature. Eventually, Vaxinnate hopes to produce a vaccine that is effective against all stereotypes of the Dengue virus.
One of the biggest challenges in developing an effective vaccine for the Dengue fever is to design a balanced immune response against all four stereotypes of the virus.
"The greatest difficulty in developing a tetravalent vaccine has been in formulation," Jeff Powell, vice president of research, and William McDonald, group leader of biochemistry at Vaxinnate explained.
Vaxinnate will be collaborating with the University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB) to achieve tetravalent protection against the Dengue fever using TLR technology. This technology will hopefully be the key to success where other production methods have failed.
Powell goes on to say that, “this funding allows us to utilize this technology to formulate the correct ratio of the different stereotypes of Dengue virus proteins to develop a tetravalent vaccine.”
The recent NIH grant will allow the company to further show that TLR technology is effective with such vaccines for other diseases like the West Nile virus and other Flavivirus diseases. The grant comes under the Small Business Innovation Research grant scheme at NIH and will be used to also support pre-clinical research on the Dengue fever vaccine. Animal tests are scheduled to commence next year.
TLR is an acronym for Toll-Like Receptor. TLR technology is based on the ability of toll-like receptors to recognize specific molecular patterns thus triggering innate immune responses. Innate immune responses are very fast, but not pathogen-specific which means that they do have a limited capacity for fighting certain infections. Vaxinnate has learned to use TLR technology to combine innate immune responses and the highly adaptive immune system. This has proven to produce effective vaccines.
The company is currently producing vaccines that combine antigens and bacterial flagellum. Vaxinnate stands by the assumption that linking flagellum and antigens substantiates a stronger immune response.
Vaxinnate is also producing a universal flu vaccine, which may be the company’s most advanced product. The company is expected to begin evaluation of the TLR5 flagellum fused universal flu vaccine in the coming weeks.
The company also hopes to produce effective vaccines for the West Nile virus, the Japanese encephalitis virus, malaria, and listeria in addition to the Dengue fever.
Fusion produced vaccines, such as those produced by Vaxinnate, may have an edge over the traditional egg-based vaccines. Fusion vaccines are simple to make using recombinant DNA techniques which are both efficient and economical because it uses bacteria like E. coli rather than eggs.
"A major advantage of the E.Coli production platform is the ease of transferring the production to a number of sites around the world, including areas such as South America and Asia where Dengue fever and other infectious diseases are endemic," representatives from Vaxinnate explained.
Currently about 2.5 billion people live in areas at risk for a Dengue fever outbreak. There is no vaccine for the disease currently available.
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