Cambridge Biostability contributes to international vaccines project

Published: 18-Jan-2007

A multicentre international collaboration aims to develop a new type of vaccine which promises to deliver higher levels of protection against three of the world\'s most challenging diseases: malaria, tuberculosis, and AIDS. The project, funded by a grant from the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health through the Grand Challenges in Global Health initiative, aims to deliver safe, effective, easy to administer, stable vaccines that will have a significant impact on global health.


A multicentre international collaboration aims to develop a new type of vaccine which promises to deliver higher levels of protection against three of the world's most challenging diseases: malaria, tuberculosis, and AIDS. The project, funded by a grant from the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health through the Grand Challenges in Global Health initiative, aims to deliver safe, effective, easy to administer, stable vaccines that will have a significant impact on global health.

Funding for the project, which is led by Professor Adrian Hill of the University of Oxford with collaborators from the University of Sheffield, the Wistar Institute and Cambridge Biostability, amounts to US$10m over five years

The project focuses on incorporating into virus-vectored vaccines genes coding for molecules known to stimulate, or adjuvant, the body's natural immune system to create a vaccine that is able to elicit a stronger, more prolonged, and ultimately protective immune response against the targeted disease. In addition to adjuvanting the immune response, this project aims to incorporate the technologies developed by Cambridge Biostability to enable the vaccine to be formulated so that it remains active when stored and transported under field conditions.

The viral vectors being used are non-replicating poxvirus and adenovirus vectors, which in themselves will not cause disease, but carry the DNA coding for the relevant antigens and adjuvant molecules to the cells responsible for generating an immune response. The project was initiated in August 2005 and Cambridge Biostability joined the project in September 2006 to develop stable formulations for such viral-vectored vaccines.

'A major impediment to the development of new vaccines for many major pathogens is not the lack of relevant antigens but the difficulty in inducing a strong protective immune response,' said Professor Hill. 'We propose to address this road-block by combining two recent advances in vaccinology.

'The first is the discovery of toll-like receptors as key recognition molecules within the immune system, and the second, the capacity of viral-vectored vaccines to generate strong cellular immune responses. We have already made good progress towards identifying appropriate vectors, adjuvants, and antigens, and welcome Cambridge Biostability aboard to explore formulating these into thermo-stable liquid vaccines.'

'The project uses recent advances in molecular vaccinology to create the vector constructs for use as new generation of vaccines. At present these have to be stored in the freezer, explained Dr Bruce Roser, chief scientific advisor of Cambridge Biostability. 'Our role is to use our stabilising technology so that these vectors can become liquid vaccines stable at room temperature and ready to use without reconstitution or need for refrigeration.'

Stable liquid vaccines can be stockpiled anywhere ready for emergency use or made available to children in remote areas or combined, as required, to reduce the difficulty and cost of multivalent vaccine development programmes They also reduce the expense of the cold chain and the degree of wastage..

Following the identification and stabilisation of improved vaccine vectors, GMP manufacture of the final stable liquid vaccine in the new CBL aseptic spray-drying facility and toxicology testing will go ahead. The aim is to proceed to Phase 1 safety and immunogenicity trials in the UK, employing the most promising malaria candidate vaccine.

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