Awarded by the National institute of Allergy and Infectious diseases (NIAID) of the National Institutes of Health, an agency of the Department of Health and Human Services, the three-year grant, paid in milestones, will see the development of the biopharmaceutical company's proprietary vector platform, which has shown to act as a highly potent adjuvant in vaccines.
With the constant threat of a potential influenza pandemic, the ability to create an efficient dose sparing technology for vaccines coupled with an increased immune response is highly desirable.
While pandemic influenza is not the direct target for the grant, it is likely to be the best candidate for technology, though it has been demonstrated the technology would work for several types of disease vaccines.
"The dose sparing capabilities are more interesting in a pandemic setting because there is the scare that there is not enough pandemic vaccine [to go around]," AlphaVax chief scientific officer Dr Jonathan Smith told US-PharmaTechnologist.com.
"Any dose sparing technology would allow the vaccine to be spread further and more people could be immunized. . . This would be a tremendous advantage."
While the actual adjuvant technology, which is in preclinical studies, could not be disclosed, Smith said the basic premise was that the adjuvant increased the immune response by creating a T-cell response. This was something a non-replicating protein vaccine can not do in the absence of the adjuvant, he said.
The adjuvant also induced a greater than 10-fold-higher antibody response.
According to studies, a single inoculation of the combined virus-like replicon particle adjuvant and influenza vaccine could induce higher immune responses than two doses of the influenza vaccine alone.
"Most protein vaccines are inefficient in creating a T-cell response and [this development] has been very exciting for us," Smith said.
The adjuvant technology is based on the company's vector platform using alphavirus RNA replicon vectors, which have been genetically engineered to contain a gene from an infectious disease, or a cancerous cell.
The platform is currently being used in Phase I trials for influenza and cytomegalovirus vaccines.
Smith said he was pleased to receive the grant, which is one of several including developing vaccines for influenza, biodefense indications and tumor immunotherapy.
"We developed these adjuvant technologies to enhance our vector-based vaccines, but we're excited to find that they also significantly improved the immunogenicity of more conventional vaccine approaches.
"[This award] does provide increased credibility in the technology," he said.
The advanced preclinical studies and manufacturing process development for the technology will be undertaken at AlphaVax's facility in the Research Triangle Park in North Carolina.
The current vaccine market is worth about $7bn but is expected to reach more than $20bn by 2015.