Vaxine awarded $2.5m bioterrorism grant

Privately-held vaccine developer Vaxine and Flinders University have been awarded a grant of US$2.5 million over three years by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) to develop vaccines that protect against bioterrorist attacks.

The NIH funding will boost research and development of Vaxine's proprietary Advax adjuvant, a modified form of insoluble inulin, a molecule derived from dahlia tubers.

Adjuvants assist the antigens in vaccines by promoting an immune response in the body. The traditional adjuvant, alum, stimulates only the antibody components of the immune system.

"Our Advax adjuvant generates an antibody response but it also causes a cellular response," said Vaxine CEO Ted Stapinksi. "In other words, it generates more antibodies, but it also triggers the cells' long-term memory, so it acts better and far longer."

Vaxine chairman Prof Nikolai Petrovsky, the principal investigator for the NIH grant, heads the vaccine research group which is developing vaccines against diseases such as influenza, hepatitis B, type I diabetes, malaria and cancer. The group is based at Flinders Medical Centre in Adelaide and is working closely with Vaxine bring these vaccines to market.

"The US government is realising the bioterrorism threat from a number of diseases. This grant is therefore to help build up vaccine development," said Stapinksi.

The US is already channelling money into the development of an anthrax vaccine back home, said Stapinksi, but diseases such as bird flu and malaria also pose significant bioterrorist threats.

"If you were very mischievous, and got the pathogens from bird flu and spread those throughout a country, that would be quite devastating," said Stapinski.

Last year the Canberra-based Vaxine was awarded a AUD$770,000 AusIndustry R&D Start grant to advance its prophylactic hepatitis B vaccine, enabling the company to begin Phase I clinical trials to confirm the vaccine's safety and tolerability. It is expected that these trials will be completed by the end of January.

While the NIH funding will assist in Vaxine's current research, which is using "known and proven" antigens with its Advax adjuvant, it will also enable the company to look at Advax's performance with new antigens such as shigella and Japanese encephalitis, said Stapinski.

"At the end of five years, we would hope to have a couple of vaccines through phase III trials and getting regulatory approval for them," he said.