LUNA INNOVATIONS INCORPORATED — Department of Defense SBIR Phase II: A16-051

Description

Developing a safe and effective malaria vaccine remains the hope for reducing the spread and resurgence of the disease. In recent years, vaccine research has broadened with subunit protein, and DNA vaccines due to their inherent safety, simpler storage and easier production at the expense of attenuated and inactivated organism based approaches. RTS, S/AS01, the most advanced subunit vaccine, has undergone phase III clinical trials. However, their efficacy results are relatively low (30% to 50%). Due to the subunit protein weak immunogenicity, often necessitate advanced delivery vectors or adjuvants. Recent progress in the design of synthetic nanoparticles that can stimulate immune system opened up a new area of vaccine development, however with limited successes in malaria vaccine preventing these candidates going into clinical trials. These approaches failed to overcome the inherent drawbacks of subunit vaccines as well as failed to address the unique and complex ability to infect hosts at multistage of its life cycle with varying antigens present at the parasite particle surface. Luna proposes a novel nano enabled malaria vaccine which will induce long-lived protective immune responses by targeting multiple epitopes at each of its unique life stages through precisely engineered, releases of antigens and/or adjuvants.