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The synthetic vaccines produce strong and long-lasting immune responses, and can be targeted to enable treatment of chronic diseases and cancers. They are potentially safer, less expensive and more convenient than existing therapies, especially for patients with chronic diseases.
Researchers in the Cooperative Research Centre for Vaccine Technology (CRC-VT) have developed two technologies that enable short synthetic peptides to induce immunity.
“The immune system does not normally notice short peptides”, says Professor Anne Kelso, Chief Executive of the CRC. “One reason is that they are usually invisible to the white blood cells that help other immune cells to produce antibodies or become killer T cells. The other reason is that most peptides do not contain danger signals that alert the immune system to respond to a threat.”
Associate Professor David Jackson and his collaborators in the CRC-VT have discovered ways to overcome both of these barriers to the use of synthetic peptide vaccines.
First, they identified short peptides (‘helper epitopes’) in the canine distemper virus that can activate helper T cells in several animal species, including different breeds of dogs. They showed that these helper epitopes boost the immune response when they are linked to target peptides from viruses, bacteria, cancers or even some hormones.
In December 2005, the global pharmaceutical company Pfizer International LLC signed a licensing agreement with the CRC-VT to acquire the rights to non-human animal uses of the helper epitope technology.
The CRC-VT team’s second discovery was that linking certain lipid (fat) molecules to the centre of the peptide vaccine in a branched structure greatly increased the efficacy of prototype vaccines. Professor Jackson says: “The lipid acts as a danger signal, fooling the immune system to respond as though it was being attacked by a harmful agent.”
“Synthetic vaccines that incorporate both the lipid and our helper epitopes have a number of advantages over traditional vaccines made from viruses or bacteria,” says Professor Kelso. “They are synthesised chemically as pure, defined products without any infectious material. They also offer potential safety advantages over many traditional vaccines.”
In 2004, the CRC-VT licensed human uses of both the lipid technology and the helper epitope technology to the start-up company VacTX Pty Ltd, formed by the CRC-VT and Australian biotechnology company EQiTX Limited to develop synthetic peptide vaccines for a range of human diseases.
“A project of this nature takes time and sustained funding,” says Professor Kelso. “Support from the Australian Government’s CRC Programme gave us the resources, extended funding and research links needed to develop and patent our intellectual property and to undertake long-term vaccine trials in animals, before licensing to commercial partners. We think this is the way to bring maximum health and economic benefits to Australia from our research.”
A recent (2005) study by The Allen Consulting Group identified the CRC-VT’s synthetic vaccine technology as one of the important prospective outcomes of the Commonwealth’s CRC Programme.
“In the absence of the collaborative research framework provided by the CRC organizational structure, the technological breakthroughs that generated these outcomes would have been unlikely to occur in the timeframe under consideration. These benefits are therefore additional to those that would have been likely to eventuate if the Commonwealth had not provided CRC funding and if all other contributors of resources to the CRCs had instead used those resources internally on their own research activities.” (Allen Report p.19).
Overall, Australia is $1.14 billion better off, or sixty cents wealthier for every dollar invested by the Federal Government in CRC research, according to the Allen Consulting Group report. This found that real consumption in the economy was up by $763 million, real investment by $417 million and tax revenue by $66m as a result of CRC research.
The work of the CRC for Vaccine Technology supports Australia’s National Research Priority No. 2, Promoting and Maintaining Good Health, and Priority 3, Frontier Technologies for Building and Transforming Australian Industries.
More information:
Professor Anne Kelso, CRC for Vaccine Technology, 07 3362 0430, 0411 105 576
Duncan Buckeridge, formerly with The Allen Consulting Group, now with
Insight Economics, 03 9909 7545 or 0425784107
Prof. Julian Cribb, CRCA Media, 0418 639 245
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