The Vaccine Group (“TVG” or the “Company”), today announces that it has been awarded a £50,000 grant from the global Bacterial Vaccine Network (“BactiVac” ) to support development of a vaccine to combat one of the main causes of bovine mastitis, E.coli.
TVG, a University of Plymouth spin out, will use the grant to run a proof-of-concept study to investigate whether its novel platform technology can produce a safe-to-use vaccine that is cheaper and more effective than the vaccines currently available to farmers. E.coli is one of three main bacteria that causes bovine mastitis.
Mastitis costs the UK dairy industry £200 million a year through reduced milk production and quality. The disease is also a serious problem in low and middle-income countries which rely on milk as a staple food source. An effective vaccine would remove the need for farmers to use antibiotics and cut the risk of the bacteria developing antibiotic resistance.
TVG’s novel technology is based on safe forms of herpesviruses, which occur in nearly all animals, including humans. Vaccines are created through modifying these benign viruses by inserting regions of the target pathogen to stimulate immune responses against the disease. Other potential applications of the technology include vaccines to fight diseases that jump from animals to humans, such as Ebola, SARS, Marburg viruses, swine and bird flus.
The technology is being developed by Dr Michael Jarvis, Associate Professor of Virology and Immunology at the University of Plymouth’s School of Biomedical Sciences, and his team. They are working in collaboration with a global network of leading academics and institutions. Professor Alain Vanderplasschen of the Department of Infectious and Parasitic Diseases at the University of Liège, Belgium, is the main collaborator on the E.coli vaccine project.
BactiVac, based at the University of Birmingham, is a new global bacterial vaccinology network designed to bring together academia, industry and policy areas to accelerate vaccine development for use in low and middle-income countries. It provides funding for catalyst projects and training to promote such multidisciplinary interactive networks.
This work is supported by the Global Challenges Research Fund Networks in Vaccines Research and Development, which is co-funded by the Medical Research Council and the Biotechnology and Biological Research Council.
More information can be found here: TVG and BactiVac
TVG co-founder and director Dr Michael Jarvis said: “Networks such as BactiVac are critical in bringing together the necessary multidisciplinary expertise required to answer society’s problems. The current project is using a vaccine against bacteria as means to control bacterial infections, but without antibiotics and associated antibiotic microbial resistance (AMR) concerns”.
Frontier IP Group chief executive officer Neil Crabb said: “This award from a world-leading vaccinology network provides strong validation of the novel technology being developed by The Vaccine Group and its potential. We’re delighted and look forward to the results of the proof-of-concept study and the opportunities they might provide for longer-term commercialisation.”