Profectus BioSciences, Inc., a technology-based vaccine company devoted to the treatment and prevention of chronic viral diseases, has received $6.25 million in grants and contracts from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease (NIAID), including three Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) grants from the Division of AIDS, National Institutes of Health totaling $2.9M. These grants are focused on optimizing the Company's portfolio of genetic adjuvants.
Profectus BioSciences seeks to harness the immune system to treat and prevent viral diseases and cancers through the delivery of proprietary prime/boost vaccines.
"Along with IL-12, our portfolio of genetic adjuvants provides us with a toolbox of options to optimize our heterologous prime/boost vaccines. These awards provide significant validation to our scientific approach and accelerate our efforts to develop therapeutic vaccines against HCV, HPV, HSV, and HIV that will have significant clinical impact," says John Eldridge, chief science officer at Profectus BioSciences.
Profectus BioSciences also received $2.75M in continued contract support from the Division of AIDS to develop its recombinant Vesicular Stomatitis Virus (rVSV) platform as an HIV vaccine. VSV is a negative-strand, non-segmented RNA virus from the order Mononegavirales that has been redesigned to enable delivery of vaccine immunogens. VSV is a particularly attractive candidate for this purpose because its genome can potentially host more than one foreign gene and it contains its own Profectus BioSciences is utilizing this technology along with its pDNA platforms to develop effective therapeutic vaccines against HCV, HPV, HSV, as well as HIV.
This funding is in addition to the $4.4M in grants announced earlier this week to support the Company's HIV prophylactic vaccine program.
Source: Profectus BioSciences
Writer: Walaika Haskins