Mountain Valley MD files patent for vaccine dose sparing adjuvant
by CM Staff
Domestic drug manufacturer immediately proceeding with selection of Contract Research Organization to conduct IPV study.
TORONTO — Mountain Valley MD Holdings Inc. announces that it has filed a POROUS ALUMINUM NANO-STRUCTURED ADJUVANT (“PANA”) patent to protect the Company’s work on vaccine dose sparing. The PANA patent includes a novel adjuvant that was invented with the objective to be fully compatible with current vaccine manufacturing methods, a critical element of the Company’s strategy to introduce technologies that offer simplicity for partner adoption and enable cost effective solutions that can be quickly brought to market.
Adjuvants are well known pharmacological or immunological agents that improve the immune response of a vaccine. Adjuvants are added to a vaccine to boost the immune response to produce more antibodies and longer-lasting immunity, thus minimizing the dose of antigen needed.
The Company’s newly invented PANA process produces a stable nano-particulate adjuvant that does not agglomerate during repeated freeze-thaw cycles, avoiding negative effects on the vaccine strength, and requires only sterile filtration versus damaging high temperature autoclaving processes (sterilization method that uses high-pressure steam) associated with micro-particulate gel-based adjuvants.
“It is a reasonable scientific objective that our new dose sparing adjuvant will enable us to deliver Inactivated Polio Vaccine with the same effect as a full standard dose that is used today, but using about 20 times less of the vaccine,” stated Mike Farber, Director of Life Sciences at Mountain Valley MD. “This is a critical achievement to optimize manufacturing output and dramatically reduce costs.”
The Company has worked with its key vaccinology advisor, Dr. John Clements, PHD, Emeritus Professor of Microbiology and Immunology at Tulane University School of Medicine, to design an adjuvant IPV study to determine the exact dose sparing achievement of its patented approach.
MVMD will be proceeding immediately with the selection of a Contract Research Organization to conduct an adjuvant IPV study that compares Alhydrogel adjuvant to the Company’s stable nano-particulate adjuvant by both intermuscular injection and intradermal injection immunization, evaluating the antibody responses following vaccination with fractional doses of IPV comparing delivery types with IPV alone or adjuvanted.
