The PATH Malaria Vaccine initiative will provide funding, whereas scientists from the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) will provide expertise to the project.
The project will apply Lipoxen’s patented technology to improve the performance and efficacy of malaria vaccines.
Lipoxen will be responsible for the development of an optimised malaria vaccine formulation, while NIAID scientists will be responsible for evaluating its activity in a relevant pre-clinical model.
Lipoxen’s proprietary ImuXen technology is based on the use of natural substances found in the human body (liposomes) to entrap the active ingredients (a malaria antigen in this project). This will help ensure their direct delivery to the appropriate cells of the immune system, thereby enhancing the effectiveness of vaccines by generating strong immune responses.
The company’s liposomal formulations are also expected to minimise the side effects of vaccination as a result of the containment and slow release of the active materials.
The resulting immune responses are expected to be much stronger and more rapid than with vaccines delivered by conventional means. The report of the project is scheduled for mid-2010.
M. Scott Maguire, CEO of Lipoxen, said: The scourge that is malaria causes a death every 30 seconds in Africa alone. With funding from PATH we will explore whether our technology is suitable for malaria vaccines. The decision by NIAID, a world-leading biomedical research organization, to participate in this project will unquestionably accelerate this exploration.”