VLP Biotech Publishes Malaria Vaccine Study Achieving 100% Sterile Immunity

Press Release

VLP Biotech Inc., a privately held pre-clinical vaccine company devoted to the advancement of epitope-focused VLPs addressing a range of infectious diseases, announces the publication of a study, funded in part by the NIH, in the journal, PLOS One (http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0124856) detailing the development of epitope focused VLPs for P. falciparum and P. viva which elicit sterile immunity to blood stage malaria infection.

Malaria is a tropical disease responsible for killing more people than any other communicable disease except tuberculosis. The current "state-of-the-art" malaria vaccine, RTS-S, has shown protective efficacy of between 30 and 50%. As such, it is generally acknowledged that "second generation" vaccines will be required to address all at-risk populations. The range of approaches in this search for such a vaccine has yielded little success to date.

To determine efficacy of its lead candidates (VLP 162 for P. falciparum and VLP 206 for P. Vivax), VLP-Biotech, in collaboration with the Zavala lab at Johns Hopkins University, utilized a mouse model which is able to evaluate human CS protein-based vaccine candidates in vivo. In this study both VLPs,(VLP162 and 206), elicited 100% sterile immunity. These results represent a significant achievement in the advancement of a "second-generation" malaria vaccine.