Sanofi Pasteur ‘actively exploring’ universal flu vaccine
pharmafile | November 10, 2015 | News story | Manufacturing and Production, Research and Development | SEEK, Sanofi Pasteur, influenza, universal flu vaccine
Sanofi Pasteur is developing a universal, cross-reactive antigen against seasonal and pandemic influenza, the company has revealed.
The French firm presented its plan for the production of a universal flu vaccine at the World Vaccines Congress in Madrid. The company supplied over 220 million doses of seasonal influenza vaccines in 2014.
Olivier Charmeil, president and chief executive of Sanofi Pasteur says: “As the world’s leader in the production of influenza vaccines, Sanofi Pasteur’s ambition is to drive innovation and to shape the future by exploring several of the leading influenza vaccine strategies.”
At the World Vaccine Congress, Dr Harry Kleanthous, Sanofi Pasteur’s associate vice president for research, discussed the potential for broader-spectrum flu vaccine approaches. This he said could lead to the development of a vaccine that stimulates protection against many influenza strains, unlike the current licensed vaccines that are designed to protect against three of four strains and often need to be changed every year, as dominant flu vaccine strains change and new strains emerge.
Kleanthous says: “We are actively exploring the development of a more-broadly protective influenza vaccine that will be designed to prevent the seasonal mismatches that can occur and that are not addressed using the current technology.
“They are complementary but can be considered ‘tailored’ antigens, in that they are designed to re-focus the immune response to key protective epitopes on the hemagglutinin, which is the active component of our currently licensed influenza vaccines,” he continued. “These antigens are still a key player in any flu vaccine, since antibodies directed against them are responsible for preventing the flu virus from binding to and infecting the cell. Creating new antigens is a central theme in our strategy.”
Sanofi Pasteur has an existing R&D collaboration agreement with the University of Georgia on a method that – according to Dr Kleanthous – could yield a novel, synthetic vaccine based on the hemagglutinin protein, designed to protect against seasonal influenza strains spanning several years, including strains not yet in existence.
Their experimental vaccine is a novel synthetic vaccine generated from key genetic sequences of many flu viruses, and is termed ‘computationally optimized broadly reactive antigen’ or COBRA, and is designed to protect against many strains over several years, due to the common sequences many flu viruses share.
Meanwhile London-based PepTCell, trading as SEEK, has also made moves in the manufacturing and production of a universal flu vaccine. SEEK has joined a collaboration with the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), to jointly lead a study of SEEK’s universal flu candidate, FLU-v.
The trial will assess the safety and immunogenicity of a cross-seasonal universal flu candidate. In a ‘challenge’ trial where patients are first provided with the trial medication and then ‘challenged’ with a known pathogen.
Flu kills between 250,000 to 500,000 people globally every year. The annual vaccine has to be recreated and approved each year as the new season’s influenza virus strains emerge.
Yasmita Kumar
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