By ARTES Biotechnology…
Vaccine development – ARTES
The biopharmaceutical contract research & development organization (CRDO), ARTES Biotechnology specializes in vaccine development, emphasizing vaccines based on VLP (virus-like particle) technology.
ARTES has particular expertise in vaccine development from microbial expression systems, where its proprietary METAVAX® platform facilitates the development of highly immunogenic subunit vaccines in human and animal health.
Vaccine development with METAVAX®
METAVAX® is based on enveloped virus like particles (VLP) derived from the recombinant surface antigen of the duck hepatitis B virus (dS) as scaffold.
METAVAX® combines efficient expression for affordable manufacturing with folding and presentation of the target antigen on the surface of virus-like particles in vaccine development. The resulting chimeric VLP´s enhance recognition and uptake by antigen presenting cells and result in a potent immune response against the target antigen.
Combined with ARTES’ Hansenula polymorpha (syn. Pichia angusta) industrial used expression platform, METAVAX® forms a convincing approach to economic production of safe and efficacious vaccines.
In summary, METAVAX® offers the following benefits:
- Presentation of small peptides, large target antigens and conformational epitopes,
- versatile expression of targets fused either to the N- or to the C-terminus of the scaffold protein,
- rapid feasibility studies by generic processes and analytics
- well suited for human and veterinary vaccines targets
Vaccine candidate testing
Vaccine candidates addressing diseases like avian and swine flu, malaria and HIV have been tested in preclinical studies without the use of adjuvants and were found to be safe, generally well tolerated and highly immunogenic.
Further, within the scope of a European funded project ARTES has developed eight different large molecular weight antigens from four animal-infecting viruses. Initial results were released in a first scientific paper. For more information click on https://microbialcellfactories.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12934-018-0868-0.
Resources
Click on ARTES successfully completed EU funded project Plurivax vaccine development for more information.