Select Vaccines reports promising results for hep C

Mebourne's Burnet Institute spinout company, Select Vaccines (ASX:SLT), recently obtained encouraging results for their hepatitis C vaccine in mice.

Select Vaccines develops and produces diagnostics, vaccines and therapeutics for infectious diseases. They are developing the hepatitis C vaccine with their platform technology that employs virus-like particles to generate a protective immune response against infection.

"We have gotten very good responses in small animals with one small dose of this hepatitis C vaccine -- a very small dose of one microgram gave good immune respsones in mice," said David Anderson, deputy director of the Burnet Institute and chief scientific officer with Select Vaccines.

Anderson said the company has shifted its focus from producing point-of-care diagnostics for diseases like hepatitis E and hepatitis A to developing vaccines for a number of infectious diseases.

"Our platform technology looks promising for a malaria vaccine construct, a HIV vaccine construct, and we are just embarking on an influenza construct," said Anderson

The platform technology involves producing virus-like particles into which surface antigens of interest, such as hepatitis C or HIV virus envelope proteins can be inserted.

"You can take the gene for the surface antigen you are interested in and express it in yeast to generate protein to add to the particles," said Anderson. "We have based our vaccine on a hepatitis B-related virus from ducks, which is unique in that you can insert all the envelope proteins from hepatitis C, or HIV, which is 680 amino acids, that's lots of amino acid sequence."

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.

Anderson said they are planning to ramp up efforts on the vaccine work in the next couple of years.

"The first couple of years we focused on getting the [point-of-care] diagnostics out there," he said. "Now we are shifting to vaccines.

"I sent off an NIH grant last week in response to a particular scheme they have aimed at commercial partners, we believe we will have a good chance of getting this."

Although initially reluctant to get involved in influenza because of limited resources and in-house expertise in hepatitis and malaria, Anderson said they have begun development of an influenza vaccine construct.

"We haven't done a lot on influenza," he said. "Hepatitis and malaria are easy as we have the reagents and everything for that research."