Profectus BioSciences Inc., a clinical-stage vaccine platform company developing novel PBS Vax vaccines for the treatment and prevention of infectious diseases, announced the award of two Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) grants totaling $3.5 million from the Division of AIDS, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), National Institutes of Health (NIH).

 

Profectus will use the awards to support the optimization and testing of a novel DNA therapeutic vaccine strategy against simian immunodeficiency (SIV) infection of macaques, the prevailing animal model for human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), in collaboration with Dr. Deborah Fuller, Associate Professor in Microbiology at the University of Washington and Washington National Primate Research Center.

 

The effort exploits a key observation published by Dr. Fuller that a skin-delivered therapeutic DNA vaccine co-formulated with a novel adjuvant-stimulated mucosal T cell response in SIV-infected macaques led to durable viral suppression in these animals after ceasing standard antiretroviral therapy.

 

As a component of the National Institutes of Health’s HIV “Cure Agenda,” this collaboration aims to improve this outcome by using more potent adjuvants from Profectus’s portfolio and a novel DNA delivery device that more efficiently delivers DNA into the skin.     

 

Date: July 29, 2014

Source: Profectus BioSciences