Unmet Need
Vaccination is an important public health intervention that has led to the rapid decline of many infectious diseases. To maximize safety and minimize reactogenicity, vaccine development is gradually shifting from whole, inactivated vaccines to well defined subunit vaccines. However, this approach often suffers from reduced immunogenicity. To address this, adjuvants are used to enhance the immune response to an antigen. Aluminum salts (alum) are the most widely used adjuvants, yet they lack utility for vaccine targets requiring cellular immunity due to poor stimulation of CD8 T cells and poor immune memory. Therefore, there is a need for aluminum adjuvants that can generate cellular immunity and be used for numerous targets, including cancer and infectious diseases.
Technology Overview
Johns Hopkins researchers have developed small, stabilized aluminum nanoparticles using a flash nanocomplexation (FNC) method that can be utilized for vaccines. The FNC platform produces small, uniform alum NPs, and encapsulates protein or peptide antigens with alum NPs in a scalable and reproducible manner, allowing for subsequent modifications of the alum NP, including coatings and surface modifications. The NPs showed superior dendritic cell activation relative to industry aluminum adjuvant controls, and has promise as a Th1 adjuvant. Therefore, these aluminum adjuvant NPs can be used to induce cellular immunity, broadening the applicability of this adjuvant to cancer and other indications that still need vaccine adjuvants.
Stage of Development
A stable nanoparticle formulation has been generated and tested on animal models.
Patent
Published PCT WO 2021/158939
Publication
N/A
