Soligenix to support development of thermostabilized Ebola vaccine candidate

Soligenix Inc. announced this week it is the recipient of $700,000 in funding to support a research project grant for the University of Hawai’i at Manoa aimed at developing a thermostabilized Ebola vaccine.

Soligenix, a biopharmaceutical company that develops and commercializes products which treat rare diseases, announced it received the subaward over five years to collaborate on the project. Under the terms of the subaward, the company will continue to support vaccine formulation development with its vaccine thermostabilization technology, ThermoVax.

“We believe that creating a vaccine with enhanced stability at elevated temperatures, which can obviate the costs and logistical burdens associated with cold chain storage and distribution, has the potential to provide a distinct advantage over other Ebola vaccines currently in development,” Christopher J. Schaber, president and CEO of Soligenix, said. “Work with the Ebola vaccine expands upon our thermostabilization platform which has already been successfully utilized with other heat sensitive vaccine candidates, such as for ricin toxin, and anthrax.”

The goal of the university’s research is to produce a trivalent filovirus vaccine that will provide protection against Ebola and related diseases without relying on cold storage. Thermostabilization may make a vaccine suited to both the developed and developing world. At present, most Ebola vaccines deal with virus and vectors that make their manufacturing, stability, and storage tricky.

However, previous collaborations on research under Axel Lehrer of the Department of Tropical Medicine, Medical Microbiology, and Pharmacology at UH Manoa and Hawaii Biotech Inc. have demonstrated the feasibility of developing a heat stable subunit Ebola vaccine.