High-Fidelity Vaccines Engineered to Go the Distance
The Rising Consequences of Bacterial Infections
We are initially focusing our efforts on developing broadly effective vaccines for:
Pneumococcal disease accounts for more than 4 million illnesses worldwide each year and is one of the leading causes of death globally for children under five. In the US, approximately 900,000 people get pneumococcal pneumonia each year, resulting in 150,000 hospitalizations. Given these serious consequences, the public health community continues to affirm the need for broader-spectrum vaccines to prevent pneumococcal disease.
Group A Strep, a pervasive disease with no available preventive treatment that causes 700 million global annual cases of strep throat and increases the risk of severe invasive infections such as sepsis, necrotizing fasciitis and toxic shock syndrome. The CDC has upgraded this disease as a threat because widespread use of some antibiotics has driven antimicrobial resistance, which has nearly tripled in the past decade.
Periodontitis, a widely prevalent disease without adequate therapies that affects an estimated 65 million US adults and causes measurable oral bone loss, tooth loss and chronic inflammation in more than half of Americans over the age of 40.
Vaccine Candidates Engineered to Overtake Convention
VAX-24, our lead vaccine candidate, is a clinical-stage 24-valent pneumococcal conjugate vaccine (PCV) designed to improve upon existing vaccines by covering the serotypes responsible for most of the remaining pneumococcal disease currently in circulation, while maintaining an immunogenicity profile comparable to PCVs available today. It is currently being investigated in a Phase 1/2 clinical proof-of-concept study in adults [NCT05266456].
VAX-XP, our second PCV candidate, builds on what’s been established with VAX-24. This PCV candidate includes an expanded breadth of coverage of greater than 30 strains to address over 90% of pneumococcal disease currently circulating in the US.
VAX-A1 is a novel preclinical conjugate vaccine candidate being developed to prevent Group A Strep, for which there is currently no vaccine. The global need for a vaccine to prevent Group A Strep is compelling in both children and adults and, as a result, this development program is supported by an award from CARB-X, a global non-profit partnership accelerating antibacterial products to address drug-resistant bacteria.
VAX-PG is our novel therapeutic vaccine candidate designed to treat periodontal disease. It leverages a key application of our cell-free protein synthesis platform, which is the ability to make “tough-to-make” protein antigens that have high-fidelity with native pathogens. Globally, severe periodontal disease afflicts 10% to 15% of the adult population, resulting in productivity losses estimated at nearly $54 billion in 2010.