Our approach to making synthetic vaccines combines several unique technologies that deliver the right immunogenic peptides, to the right place, resulting in a strong and long-lasting T-cell immune response. It involves the following steps:
Creating a library of synthetic MHC class I peptide constructs derived from highly conserved internal components of a disease-causing microbe or pathogen.
- This approach uses Immunotope Inc.’s antigen technology, enabling multi-valent vaccines to be developed.
Combining synthetic peptides with a gold nanotechnology carrier system to make an extremely small particle, less than 5 nanometres in diameter.
- This technology is licensed through an exclusive deal with Midatech Pharma
- These particles can directly enter immune processing cells, triggering a cell mediated immune response to viral infected host cells
- The small size of the nanoparticles means that our vaccines are suitable for dermal immunization using less invasive microneedle skin patch administration.
Reverse-engineering the immune response using post-infectious blood to identify and select the immunogenic peptide-gold nanoparticle components that elicit the strongest cell-mediated immune response.
- The final vaccine constructs elicit an immune response similar to that which would occur naturally in individuals who were exposed and then recovered from a viral infection, e.g. an Ebola survivor.
