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The Vaccine Group (“TVG” or the “Company”) is pleased to announce the appointment of Dr Jeremy Salt as Chief Executive Officer.

Jeremy has extensive experience in senior roles in animal healthcare across organisations in the commercial and not-for-profit sectors. He is joining TVG from GALVmed, a not-for-profit organisation that develops and makes available livestock vaccines, medicines and diagnostics for small-scale livestock producers, where he was Chief Scientific Officer. GALVmed is funded by the UK government’s Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office through UKAID and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Before GALVmed, he was the director of Biologicals Research & Development for the Europe, Africa and Middle East arm of the world’s biggest animal health group Zoetis, and previously the vaccines division of Pfizer Animal Health. Jeremy has completed a PhD in the immunology of foot and mouth virus persistence.

As TVG Chief Executive, Jeremy will be responsible for the continued development and commercialisation of the Company’s novel vaccine platform technology, which is being used to develop a wide range of different vaccines to combat zoonotic and economically-damaging diseases. These include vaccines to combat COVID-19, Ebola, Lassa fever, African Swine Fever, porcine respiratory and reproductive virus (PRRSV), and bovine tuberculosis.

Jeremy Salt, Chief Executive Officer of The Vaccine Group said: “I am delighted to be taking this leadership role with The Vaccine Group at this important time in its development. The COVID-19 pandemic has raised the profile of vaccines as a key component of infectious disease control. The importance of multiple technological approaches to vaccine development has been shown to be critical. The Vaccine Group is well-positioned to contribute to this market with its novel vaccine platform technologies.”

15 October 2020 The Vaccine Group (“TVG” or the “Company”) today announces it is to collaborate with The Pirbright Institute  (“Pirbright” or the “Institute”)  to develop vaccine candidates to combat the porcine respiratory and reproductive syndrome virus (“PRRSV”) in a project supported and funded by ECO Animal Health Group plc (“ECO”).

Under the terms of the agreement, ECO will fund the 18-month development project.  This will see TVG use its novel vaccine technology as a platform for two prototype vaccines to tackle PRRSV.

Pirbright, a world leading centre of excellence in controlling viral diseases of livestock and viruses that spread from animal to humans, will supply the PRRSV genes  and conduct the animal trials for the vaccines to test their effectiveness.

The vaccines will be  created by inserting non-infectious conserved genes from PRRSV into a benign herpesvirus, which then stimulates the immune system when delivered into animals. Vaccines that use herpesviruses as their base have been shown to provoke particularly strong reactions from T cells, which are a vital part of the antiviral response.

Collectively, PRRSV-1 and -2 are responsible for one of the most economically damaging diseases to the global pig industry. They are estimated to cost European pig farmers about €1.5 billion a year and those in the US approximately $600 million.

Professor Simon Graham, Group Leader of PRRS Immunology at The Pirbright Institute said: “This is an exciting project that takes a novel approach to addressing the urgent requirement for improved vaccines to combat the global spread of PRRSV.”

Dr Hafid Benchaoui, Head, Global R&D, ECO Animal Health Group said: “ECO Animal Health recognizes the significant, ongoing challenge that PRRSV poses for our customers all over the world.  This collaboration with The Pirbright Institute and The Vaccine Group leverages the deep scientific expertise of The Pirbright Institute and The Vaccine Group’s novel herpesvirus vector technology in an exciting new approach to PRRSV vaccination”

TVG Founder and Chief Scientific Officer, Associate Professor Dr Michael Jarvis said: “This is an exciting opportunity that brings together critical basic science and translational expertise towards addressing this major infectious disease in pigs.  As PRRSV is a member of the Nidovirus group of viruses, a group that also contains SARS-CoV-2, what we learn from development of a PRRSV vaccine may also help inform our development of a vaccine against SARS-CoV-2. ”

Frontier IP Chief Commercialisation Officer Matthew White said: “This collaboration with The Pirbright Institute and ECO Animal Health provides a strong endorsement for the potential of The Vaccine Group’s novel vaccine platform technology. The company has made very good progress this year, and we are delighted it continues to go from strength to strength.”

The Vaccine Group (the “Company” or “TVG”) is to play a central role in a multi-million-dollar project to protect US military forces and homeland from Ebola, Lassa fever and other deadly zoonotic viruses that jump from animals to humans.  

The University of Plymouth spin out is a principal partner in an international team of scientists  awarded up to US$9.67million (£7.4 million) by the US government’s Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (the “Agency” or “DARPA”). The Company was established by Dr Michael Jarvis, Associate Professor in Immunology and Virology in the University’s Institute of Translational and Stratified Medicine.

The project is led by the One Health Institute in the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine and the Center for Comparative Medicine in the UC Davis schools of Medicine and Veterinary Medicine.

TVG’s role will be to develop novel vaccine technologies which enable scalable vaccination of remote and hard-to-reach wildlife animal populations that harbour zoonotic viruses. Frontier IP, which provides commercialisation services to university spin outs in return for equity, holds a 19.2 per cent stake in TVG.

The aim of the three-and-a-half-year project, part of DARPA’s Preventing Emerging Pathogenic Threats (PREEMPT) program, is to predict where zoonotic viruses might arise and then prevent them from spilling over into humans.

TVG’s other partners in the project will work on analytic tools to predict when a zoonotic virus in a geographic hot spot is most likely to make the jump from animals into humans.

Although PREEMPT is intended to protect US military service members and the local communities where they operate, it reflects increasing concern among global health agencies about the potential pandemics emerging from animals to infect humans. Diseases can arise from domestic and wild animals, including fruit bats, gorillas, pigs, rodents and poultry. TVG’s project work will initially focus on Lassa fever in rats and Ebola in non-human primates.

TVG’s novel technology is based on safe forms of cytomegaloviruses (CMV) that are naturally prevalent in nearly all animals, including humans. The vaccines are created by modifying the CMV viruses – inserting small regions of the viral pathogen being targeted to stimulate immune responses against the virus prior to possible exposure.

Because the resulting vaccine is CMV-based, it has the potential for wide uptake within an animal community. Once a critical mass of animals has been immunised, the zoonotic disease no longer poses a danger to humans.

TVG and its partners will explore the safety and efficacy of such scalable countermeasures and delivery mechanisms. The Company is also developing techniques to accelerate vaccine development.

For the PREEMPT project, TVG is collaborating with leading academics and institutions from across the world on the project. As well as the One Health Institute, UC Davis, the principal partners also include the Center for Comparative Medicine UC Davis, and the University of Idaho.

Other key partner institutions involved include the Heinrich Pette Institute, Leibniz Institute for Experimental Virology in Germany, the University of Glasgow, The Institute of Respiratory Health at the University of Western Australia in Australia and the University of Makeni and Ministerial Governmental partners, Sierra Leone.

The vaccine technology being developed by TVG can also be used conventionally, through injections and sprays. Early stage trials show it has the potential to be longer lasting than existing vaccines, with an early application being developed to combat bovine TB.  

DARPA PREEMPT program manager Brad Ringeisen said: “DARPA challenges the PREEMPT research community to look far left on the emerging threat timeline and identify opportunities to contain viruses before they ever endanger humans. We require proactive options to keep our troops and the homeland safe from emerging infectious disease threats.”

The Vaccine Group founder and director Dr Michael Jarvis said: “This highly collaborative project epitomizes the modern approach to science. The way DARPA has designed PREEMPT has brought together key scientific expertise from around the world towards solving the major threat of pandemic disease. Not only will this project benefit US military personnel. It also has the potential to benefit the global population as a whole.” 

Frontier IP chief executive Neil Crabb said: “We are very excited  our portfolio company The Vaccine Group and its unique technology has such an important part in a project that could result in a breakthrough in how potential pandemics are prevented.”

UC Davis Center for Comparative Medicine co-principal investigator and professor emeritus Peter Barry said: “A vaccine designed for broad uptake within a specific animal community could be a game changer by enabling large populations of animals to be protected against emerging diseases. If we can disrupt the spread of a virus within an animal community, we will help to eliminate the threat of animal diseases ultimately spilling over into humans.”

The Vaccine Group (“TVG” or the “Company”), today announces that it has won a £403,000 grant as part of a £1.46 million Anglo-Chinese project to combat an emerging antibiotic-resistant disease able to jump from pigs to humans with potentially fatal effect.

The project, funded by the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) and administered by Innovate UK, will develop TVG’s novel herpesvirus-based platform technology to create a single-use vaccine for use in pigs. The work will be undertaken with Chinese partners, including the Shanghai Veterinary Research Institute at the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Science, and the Shanghai Jiao Tong University. A major producer of swine and poultry vaccines, the Pulike Biological Engineering Company, is the commercial partner.

The vaccine will target a bacterium called Streptococcus suis (S.suis), which can cause meningitis, blood poisoning, or septicaemia, as well as many other serious diseases in humans. Incidents have been rising globally and in Asia it is now classified as an emerging threat. The disease is currently treated with antibiotics, but there is growing evidence that S.suis is becoming resistant to them. Effective vaccines remove the need to use antibiotics in animals.

The University of Plymouth spin out was founded by Dr Michael Jarvis, Associate Professor of Immunology and Virology at the university’s Institute of Translational and Stratified Medicine. Frontier IP holds a 19.2 per cent stake in the Company.

TVG’s technology is based on safe forms of herpesviruses, which occur in nearly all animals, including humans. The vaccines are created by modifying these viruses through inserting regions of the pathogen being targeted to stimulate immune responses against the disease.

The grant was awarded as part a bilateral research competition between the DHSC’s Global antimicrobial resistance (AMR) Innovation Fund and the Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology: UK-China partnerships against antimicrobial resistance get funding

A review by economist Lord O’Neill estimated that AMR caused 700,000 deaths each year globally.

Professor Dame Sally Davies, England’s Chief Medical Officer, said: “Drug resistant infections claim hundreds of thousands of lives across the globe. An innovative and international response is vital – this latest collaboration between the UK and China guarantees much needed research to address the complex and world-wide issue of AMR.”

Dr Kath Mackay, Interim Director – Ageing Society, Health & Nutrition, Innovate UK said: “Antimicrobial resistance is one of the biggest global challenges in healthcare. It has been estimated that the AMR threat could lead to 10 million extra deaths a year and cost the global economy up to £75 trillion by 2050.

This partnership between China and the UK’s world-leading bio-industry is a vital contribution to tacking this issue through international co-operation.”

TVG founder and director Associate Professor Michael Jarvis said: “Vaccination to control bacterial diseases has been shown to be really effective in the fish industry, and it does this without increasing bacterial resistance to antibiotics (AMR). We’re therefore very excited about the opportunity this grant gives to expand this approach to a major bacterial disease of pigs that is increasingly being spread to humans.

AMR and emerging infectious disease are global problems, and this grant also demonstrates the strength of bringing together scientists and stakeholders from across the globe to address common societal issues. 

This exciting development supports the novel approach The Vaccine Group has towards creating new vaccines to combat the spread of dangerous diseases from one animal species to another.”

Frontier IP chief executive officer Neil Crabb said: “TVG’s novel vaccine technology has the potential to play a material role in beating the threats of antimicrobial resistance and, more widely, from life-threatening diseases which infect animals and then jump to humans.”

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.”