Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 2002. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 2002. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
Reuters NewMedia - November 12, 2002
Richard Woodman
Chairman and chief executive Paul Drayson told Reuters that the vaccine, being developed with GlaxoSmithKline, showed "proof of concept" in early pre-clinical studies.
"In other words, these are animals which have the (HIV) infection and which have been treated with the therapeutic vaccine and whose viral load within the bloodstream has been kept down.
"That gives us the proof of principle to be able to go into the first human clinical trials and we would be expecting to do that next year."
Unlike traditional vaccines that use a weakened form of a virus to stimulate an immune response, DNA vaccines use a small portion of DNA. This opens up the prospect of safer vaccines that can treat as well as prevent disease.
PowderJect is developing five DNA vaccines that would be injected at supersonic speed into the skin as a dry powder, doing away with the need for needles.
"Here we are taking DNA and delivering the DNA into the immune cells in the top layer of the skin using the PowderJect device," Drayson said.
"These cells act as little factories to convert the DNA into proteins which stimulate the immune response.
"It is a much safer approach because you are not delivering a part of a virus, you are just delivering one genetic component of it, and we see that we get very strong immune responses."
Drayson said that developing a DNA vaccine for HIV was a high-risk venture with significant technical hurdles. But if all went well, launch should be toward the end of the decade. PowderJect, which spent $21 million on research and development in the past 6 months, also plans to start phase ll studies next year of its needle-free technology using its top-selling Fluvirin flu vaccine.
"This uses our existing manufacturing process and flu antigen, so it is a relatively lower risk development project," Drayson said. He forecast that the launch, around 2006 or 2007, could signal the end of traditional needle injections.
The company says clinical trials of DNA vaccines for herpes and cancer should also begin in 2003. It is also targeting Hantavirus as part of a collaboration with the US military.
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