Prima to fund oral vaccine program Nick EvansThursday, 19...

Prima to fund oral vaccine program

Nick Evans
Thursday, 19 November 2009

PRIMA Biomed has bolstered its early-stage pipeline, announcing it will invest money in researching an oral vaccine delivery platform being developed at the University of New South Wales.



The technology comes from the research work of Professor Neil Foster’s Super Critical Fluids Research group at UNSW, according to Prima director Martin Rogers, and centres around the development of a way of encapsulating vaccines so they can be carried beyond the stomach wall.

Rogers said Prima would initially target the use of a human papilloma virus vaccine for the delivery technique, with the company agreeing to pay for early-stage discovery work at UNSW and by Professor Ian Fraser and his team from the Diamantina Institute for Cancer at the University of Queensland, where the first HPV vaccine, Gardasil, was developed.

“We think a cervical cancer vaccine has some really good implications, and particularly for the developing world, in terms of raising patient compliance.

“It’s very early stage, but it’s very exciting for us to get involved with something like this,” he said.

Rogers said confidentiality agreements prevented the company from disclosing the commercial terms of the agreement, including how much money Prima will invest in the program, or what intellectual property stake the company will receive in return for its investment.

Prima’s contribution to the research program will pay for the work of a number of PhD and post-doctoral level researchers, and the research will be conducted at arm’s length from Prima, as the company is still concentrating on the launch of its Phase 2b trial of therapeutic cancer vaccine CVac.

Rogers told BTN the company expected the first patients to be enrolled in the US trial of CVac in either late December or early next year.