KINGSTON, R.I., Sept. 21, 2016\u2014溏心vlog免费B站 Research Professor Annie De Groot and her team at EpiVax have been awarded a $600,000 grant from the National Institutes of Health to improve a vaccine for the H7N9 avian influenza virus.<\/p>\n
De Groot is the co-founder, chief executive officer and chief scientific officer of EpiVax, a Providence-based biotechnology company. She is also the director of the 溏心vlog免费B站 Institute for Immunology and Informatics, where she and her colleagues apply bioinformatics tools to develop vaccines for emerging infectious diseases.<\/p>\n
The grant was from the Small Business Innovation Research program at the National Institutes of Health. De Groot and 溏心vlog免费B站 associate professor Lenny Moise, the director of vaccine research at EpiVax, will oversee the research in collaboration with Ted Ross, director of the Center for Vaccines and Immunology at the University of Georgia.<\/p>\n
The novelty of the program stems from the concept that vaccines can be \u201cimmune engineered\u2019\u2019 to be more effective, De Groot says. Re-engineering the viral proteins to produce more of an immune response without modifying their ability to generate protective antibodies to the original \u201cwild-type\u201d version is the major focus of the work under the new program, she says.<\/p>\n
The H7N9 influenza has been called a \u201cstealth virus\u2019\u2019 because of its ability to evade the human immune response, both in natural infections and in vaccine formulations. H7N9 vaccines developed using conventional methods have significantly underperformed in clinical trials. De Groot says that the EpiVax program aims to re-engineer H7N9 viral proteins to be more easily detected by the immune system, resulting in a more potent vaccine product.<\/p>\n
The first version of the vaccine from EpiVax will soon enter a trial in Australia in collaboration with Vaxine in Australia and Protein Sciences Corp. in Connecticut.<\/p>\n
H7N9 influenza emerged in China in 2013, and has one of the highest mortality rates among all avian influenza viruses for humans. Although sustained human-to-human spread of this virus has yet to occur, the high mortality rate of the virus is of great concern should it develop pandemic potential, De Groot says.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are fortunate to have Dr. Annie De Groot and her team conducting innovative biotech research here in Rhode Island,\u201d says U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse.\u00a0 \u201cThis federal funding is a boost for EpiVax\u2019s work to engineer new vaccines and an investment in Providence\u2019s life sciences industry.\u201d<\/p>\n