DOR BioPharma has announced that it has been awarded an approximate $9.4m grant from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), a division of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
The grant would fund, over a five-year period, the development of formulation and manufacturing processes for vaccines, including RiVax, that are stable at elevated temperatures.
The development of heat-stable vaccines would take advantage of combining several novel formulation processes with well-characterised adjuvants that have been evaluated in numerous vaccine field trials. The formulation and process technology funded by the grant would be applied to the further development of RiVax, a subunit vaccine for prevention of ricin toxin lethality and morbidity.
This could lead to new subunit vaccines that would bypass current cold chain requirements for storage and distribution. Vaccines to be stored in the Strategic National Stockpile (SNS) and used under emergency situations for biodefense are expected to have long-term shelf life.
Robert Brey, chief scientific officer of DOR, said: “The novel technology supported by this grant will potentially develop new vaccines to address the practical issue of long-term stability in stockpiled vaccines and can subsequently be applied to other vaccine products. These new vaccines could be stored for long periods of time at ambient temperature, and avoid the current need for a well-controlled environmental cold chain. This would result in more useful vaccines for both civilian and military purposes.”