Lipoxen secures PATH money for malaria vaccine

Funding

Lipoxen has joined the growing band of biotechs that are raising drug development funding from charities, announcing the PATH Malaria Vaccine Initiative will fund work to apply the company’s ImuXen technology to enhance the performance of malaria vaccine candidates.

Scientists from the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases will provide expertise to the project, which is anticipated to report results in mid-2010.

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.

The ImuXen technology uses liposomes to entrap the active ingredients, in this case a malaria antigen, to ensure direct delivery to the appropriate cells of the immune system, thereby enhancing the effectiveness of vaccines by generating strong and broadly-based immune responses. The resulting immune responses are expected to be much stronger and more rapid than with vaccines delivered by conventional means.

M. Scott Maguire, CEO of Lipoxen, said, “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.”

Lipoxen has other vaccine candidates in its pipeline, including one against HIV. The company is also working alongside the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative (IAVI) on the improved delivery of HIV vaccine candidates.