Emergent gains licensing rights from Coley

Emergent has signed a license agreement with Coley for the use of the vaccine and intends to utilize it the development of new anthrax vaccines. Financial terms of the license agreement were not disclosed.

Coley’s VaxImmune is a proprietary Toll-like receptor 9 (TLR9) agonist designed to induce both an enhanced antibody response and a potent killer T cell immune response to infections in order to achieve and sustain a clinical response without compromising safety.

“As a leading developer of both biodefense and commercial vaccines and therapeutics, we continually assess novel adjuvant technologies as a critical component of our development strategy,” said Fuad El-Hibri, chairman and CEO of Emergent.

“We believe that gaining access to a promising adjuvant technology like VaxImmune provides us a distinct advantage. This adjuvant has the potential to significantly enhance immune responses. Securing rights to VaxImmune demonstrates our commitment to developing our anthrax franchise, which includes BioThrax (Anthrax Vaccine Adsorbed), the only FDA licensed vaccine against anthrax infection, as well as development programs focused on improvements to BioThrax, an enhanced anthrax vaccine and an anthrax immune globulin (therapeutic).”

The agreement allows the company to build on data from a phase I clinical study funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) of the DoD. This double-blind phase I clinical trial was designed to evaluate the safety and immunogenicity of a combined product candidate using BioThrax and VaxImmune compared to BioThrax alone and VaxImmune alone.