RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK, N.C., July 10 /PRNewswire/ -- AlphaVax announced today that it has received a new three-year, $3.6 million award from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), an agency of the Department of Health and Human Services.
The award supports advanced preclinical studies and manufacturing process development for new adjuvant technologies that are based on the company’s proprietary vector platform. The key experimental observations forming the basis of these programs are that alphavirus RNA replicon vectors, when appropriately configured and delivered in virus-like replicon particles (VRP), can function as highly potent adjuvants for co-administered protein immunogens, such as influenza vaccines. When inoculated into animals, these RNA replicon-based adjuvants not only promote significant T cell responses to influenza proteins that are not seen in the absence of the adjuvants, but also induce greater than 10-fold-higher antibody responses. In animals, a single inoculation of the combined VRP adjuvant and influenza vaccine can induce higher immune responses than two doses of the influenza vaccine alone. Thus, these adjuvants show significant potential as dose-sparing strategies for influenza vaccines which could be very useful in the event of a pandemic where vaccine could be in short supply.
“We are pleased to receive this new award,” said Jonathan Smith, Ph.D., AlphaVax Chief Scientific Officer and Principal Investigator for the new grant. “We developed these adjuvant technologies to enhance our vector-based vaccines, but were excited to find that they also significantly improved the immunogenicity of more conventional vaccine approaches.”
AlphaVax has several other active NIH grants supporting vaccine development for infectious diseases, biodefense, and tumor immunotherapy. The company is currently testing vaccines for influenza and cytomegalovirus disease in clinical trials, and expects to initiate additional trials with vaccines for colon cancer and pandemic influenza in 2007 and 2008.
About AlphaVax
AlphaVax, Inc. is a North Carolina-based, clinical-stage company that uses its novel alphavirus vector platform technology that has proven to be highly flexible and immunogenic, and allows the same manufacturing process and formulation strategies to be applied to many different products. In addition to programs in influenza and cytomegalovirus, important alphavaccine disease targets include cancer, HIV and a number of biodefense vaccine products. The AlphaVax headquarters and R&D facilities are located in Research Triangle Park, and its GMP manufacturing facility is located in Lenoir, NC. The company employs staff with expertise spanning vaccine design, process development, GMP manufacturing, quality assurance, and regulatory and clinical affairs.
AlphaVax, Inc.
CONTACT: Dr. Jonathan Smith of AlphaVax, +1-919-595-0321
Web site: http://www.alphavax.com/
