ConserV Bioscience: Getting Ahead Of New COVID-19 Strains
Researching Next-Generation Vaccines
Executive Summary
The SEEK spin-out ConserV Bioscience is developing a broad-spectrum coronavirus vaccine, aiming to get ahead of the arrival of new strains of the virus.
Developing vaccines that get ahead of pathogenic mutations and protect against the next coronavirus pandemic is one of the aims of the new Oxford, UK-based vaccine development company, ConserV Bioscience. The firm also has a pipeline of preclinical and clinical vaccine candidates for conditions such as mosquito-borne infections, rotavirus and Chagas.
Spun out of the UK life sciences company incubator, SEEK in 2020, ConserV Bioscience’s COVID-19 technology is focused on inducing broad-spectrum and long-term immunity to different types of coronavirus. It involves identifying and using conserved immunoreactive regions from external and internal coronavirus proteins, from each virus genus, and encoding them in messenger RNA.
“We are not simply structural biologists looking for epitopes that fit into MHC molecules, we have an algorithm that predicts with a high degree of accuracy the epitopes that will activate immune responses,” CEO Kimbell Duncan told Scrip. “We are encoding conserved proteins from each of the four types of coronavirus, and we are anticipating future jumps from animals to humans, and trying to produce a vaccine that anticipates and protects against such jumps,” Duncan added.
“We know that pandemic strains are arriving with regular frequency now. And it's important to try and get in front of that,” Duncan noted. “The technology that has evolved over the last 10 or 15 years allows us to be more creative in designing vaccines,” he added. Duncan noted that the company was not trying to join the current race for a COVID-19 vaccine, rather it was trying to protect against the next pandemic and against any dramatic mutations in current strains (See the sidebar for the current state of vaccine research).
ConserV is collaborating with the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the US to evaluate the use of the laboratory’s “nanolipoprotein” particle technology (NLP) as a delivery system for ConServ’s mRNA, the company announced on 19 January. It is expected that the active ingredient and vehicle would be lyophilized and shipped separately, without onerous cold-storage constraints, and the vaccine formulated just before injection.The collaboration is aimed at demonstrating immunogenicity and protective responses in preclinical studies, and to support the start of clinical studies.
Researchers are currently conducting cellular assay studies and expect to move into animal studies later this year, and “we should be in a position to move this into a clinical study in an abbreviated timeframe,” Duncan explained. The research has been backed by shareholder funds, governmental grants and the US NIH.
ConserV was spun out with a pipeline of vaccines that include a broad-spectrum influenza vaccine that is ready to enter Phase III studies, a mosquito saliva vaccine that aims to protect against mosquito-borne diseases that is ready to enter Phase II studies, a clinical stage HIV vaccine, and potential vaccines against Chagas, rotavirus, hepatitis C and hepatitis B that are in preclinical studies. The flu and mosquito saliva candidate vaccines are sublicensed to the 51%-owned subsidiary, Imutex Ltd, which is 49% owned by hVIVO Plc (Open Orphan PLC). (Also see "Imutex's Universal Flu Vaccine Inches Forward On New Data" - Scrip, 11 Jan, 2019.)
ConserV’s chief scientific officer, Olga Pleguezuelos, believes the current pandemic has increased interest in novel vaccine technologies. For a long time, vaccines in development were based on conventional technologies such as inactivated viruses. Now, the new COVID-19 vaccines have shown that other technologies can quickly develop new vaccines, and they may be more efficacious as well, Pleguezuelos noted.