Melbourne-based biotechnology company, Select Vaccines Ltd (ASX:SLT), today announced positive results from its first pre-clinical studies of a potential vaccine against hepatitis C. The results followed nine months of animal studies and mark an important step in the development of a Hepatitis C vaccine.
Managing Director of Select Vaccines, Dr Martin Soust, said “We have been waiting for the outcome from these initial animal studies before considering a very substantial longer-term commitment to vaccine development. We are now looking to rapidly accelerate the hepatitis C program and expand the work we are doing to cover the development of vaccines for other infectious diseases.”
“These results have exceeded our expectations and the commercial potential for this program is substantial, with the market for a vaccine against hepatitis C estimated to be worth more than $US500 million. There are almost 300 million people worldwide who are infected with hepatitis C with up to 10 million more people being infected each year,” added Dr Soust.
“This is a remarkable result and it provides a strong indication of the potential for our development of the vaccine. We observed very good immune responses after just one small dose of less than one microgram of this hepatitis C vaccine, providing a very good immune response in mice,” said Associate Professor David Anderson, Chief Scientific Officer with Select Vaccines.
Select Vaccines is developing the hepatitis C vaccine with its platform technology that employs virus-like particles to generate a protective immune response against infection. The platform technology involves producing virus-like particles into which specific vaccine antigens of interest, in this case the envelope proteins from hepatitis C virus, can be inserted. “You can take the gene for an antigen and express it as an integral part of our virus-like particles. The development of the vaccines has involved making a number of different versions of virus-like particles to find the one that assembles the best, then putting this into yeast to generate greater amounts of it, and then vaccinating animals with it to see whether an immune response is generated,” added Anderson.
Dr Soust concluded, “If we continue to show the kinds of immune responses that should work in a protective manner then we are able to look towards developing a product that has immediate benefit and will offer protection for those who are at risk of being infected.”
Select Vaccines expects to move through further pre-clinical studies in larger animals and to produce purified injectable material under GLP conditions for use in a preclinical toxicology study before moving into a phase I clinical trial. For Further Information Call:
Martin Soust Tim Allerton Select Vaccines City PR 03 8508 8250 02 9267 4511
