EpiVax Receives NIH Grant for $390,000 to Optimize HIV Vaccin...( PROVIDENCE R.I. Nov. 26 /- EpiVax Inc...),Health

PROVIDENCE, R.I., Nov. 26 /PRNewswire/ -- EpiVax, Inc., a leader in the field of computational immunology, announced today that it has received a grant from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), a division of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), to optimize delivery of an HIV vaccine. NIAID will provide EpiVax with $390,000 over two years for the proposed research.

"The recent failure of the investigational HIV vaccine tested in the Phase II clinical trial known as STEP is a strong indicator that more traditional approaches to vaccine design and delivery are simply not going to work for HIV. That's why the EpiVax brand of "outside the box" thinking was funded; the world is looking for safer, more effective ways to prevent AIDS," said Dr. Annie De Groot, CEO and CSO of the company. "We are especially aware of the need for such a vaccine as we approach World AIDS Day, a time when our thoughts turn to the 50 million people who have been infected with HIV and the 20 million who have already died from AIDS."

Using the grant funding from the NIH, EpiVax will develop a pro-inflammatory and non-tolerogenic HIV vaccine delivery system based on the dendritic cell targeting anti-DEC-205 antibody. The success of anti-DEC-205 as a vaccine carrier is dependent on co-administration of non-specific dendritic cell maturation factors such as CD40-ligand. In their absence, anti-DEC-205 induces antigen-specific tolerance rather than immunity. EpiVax reasons that regulatory T-cell epitopes contained in anti-DEC-205 promote a tolerogenic reaction that is only overcome through the coadministration of clinically dangerous or untested non-specific immuno-stimulators. This idea is based on EpiVax' discovery of a set of natural regulatory T-cell epitopes derived from human immunoglobulins that induce tolerance by stimulating regulatory T cells. EpiVax has already verified experimentally that these epitopes
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