VaxCelerate 3.0: A Scalable and Efficient Self-Assembling Vaccine Platform to Enable Rapid Development of US Military Vaccines
Abstract
Traditional development of a new vaccine against an infectious disease like influenza or Mpox is incredibly expensive (costing millions to billions of dollars) and takes a long time (5 to 10 years) from start to finish. This is to a large degree due to the fact that each vaccine is individually designed and tailor-made. The primary objective of our proposal is to optimize our new vaccine platform that has the potential to make many different vaccines for different infectious diseases or pathogens using the same design and manufacturing process. Our approach, if successful, would simplify vaccine development and could make new vaccines less expensive to develop and reduce the time it takes to do so. Our so-called self-assembling vaccine, or SAV for short, uses two chemical components or parts that can fully assemble spontaneously into a final vaccine. One component is a protein that helps deliver the vaccine to immune cells and enhance the vaccine response against the infectious agent. This protein is the same for all vaccines produced on our platform. The other component is a part of a protein that helps immune cells recognize an infecting agent. This component is different for each vaccine depending on the infectious agent. These two components snap together like Lego bricks when mixed together in a simple salt solution at room temperature. The product is also stable and can be stored in a simple refrigerator. While this vaccine platform has shown the ability to stimulate immune responses against different kinds of infectious agents, there are specific things that can be done that would both speed up the time required to make a new vaccine and make the vaccine better. In this project, the scientists and physicians will do three things: 1. Show that the same SAV platform can make multiple different vaccines that can protect against two different types of infectious viruses (a virus that causes the respiratory disease called flu and a pox virus that causes skin lesions). 2. Make the necessary improvements to the way the vaccine is made to maximize efficiency and the amount of the vaccine that can be produced in a short period of time. 3. Show that these improvements in SAV production can allow investigators to make a completely new vaccine very quickly that is also protective in an animal model. While the development of this vaccine platform is designed to make new vaccines specifically for the U.S. military, SAV would have general application in making all kinds of vaccines more quickly and less expensively. If this project is successful, the use of the same design for multiple vaccines would shorten the development time and lower the cost, especially in the early stages of vaccine development. The purpose of the project is to make it easier to design new vaccines against infectious agents against which there is not yet a vaccine in order to provide additional protection to military personnel. At times, military personnel require vaccines most civilians would not need to have because our troops travel and work all over the world. However, some vaccines developed for the military will also prove to be useful to Veterans and family members of military personnel as well as to the general public.
Document Details
- Document Type
- DoD Grant Award
- Publication Date
- Jan 04, 2024
- Source ID
- HT94252310586
Entities
People
- Mark Poznansky
Organizations
- Massachusetts General Hospital
- United States Army