GeoVax to Present at the Third International Conference on Vaccines Research and Development
Presentation to Focus on Development of Zika, Ebola and Lassa Fever Vaccines
ATLANTA, GA--(Marketwired - Nov 13, 2017) - GeoVax Labs, Inc. (OTCQB: GOVX), a biotechnology company developing human vaccines, announced that its Chief Scientific Officer, Farshad Guirakhoo, PhD, will deliver a talk, entitled "Development of Novel and Safe Single-Dose Vaccines; Preclinical Efficacy Data for Zika, Ebola and Lassa Fever," during the Third International Conference on Vaccines Research and Development, on Tuesday, November 14 in Washington, DC.
Dr. Guirakhoo will discuss GeoVax's vaccine platform which utilizes its recombinant Modified Vaccinia Ankara (MVA) vector to express foreign antigens on virus-like particles (VLPs) in the person being vaccinated. The MVA-VLP platform has several advantages including the ability to use single inoculations to achieve protection. Single-dose protection is a favorable characteristic of a vaccine for emerging infectious disease outbreak response, given the speed of spread of pathogens and the impracticality of multi-dose regimens in the under-resourced settings where outbreaks often occurs.
In studies for Ebola, Lassa and Zika, a single dose of GeoVax's vaccine fully protected animals against a lethal challenge. During his talk, Dr. Guirakhoo will present the latest data from these studies, as examples of the broad utility of the MVA-VLP platform for other indications. These three vaccines are now ready to enter human clinical trials. The platform which has previously shown to elicit both durable antibody and T cell responses against HIV in several clinical trials, is also currently being investigated for use against malaria, chronic hepatitis B infection, and in cancer immunotherapy in combination with immune checkpoint inhibitors.
GeoVax's MVA-VLP platform technology is built upon a 4th generation MVA vector system that is improved for high expression and stable transgenes during manufacture. It has the advantages of being a live replication-competent vector in avian cells for manufacturing, yet replication-deficient in mammalian cells for vaccination, thus inherently safe. Importantly, MVA vaccines elicit protective T cell as well as antibody responses in animals and humans. The MVA platform can be combined with the potent immunogenicity of VLPs or be used to express proteins in their native multimeric conformations enabling vaccines that induce full protection after a single dose. The safety and immunogenicity of the platform was first validated in animal and human studies using DNA and MVA-VLP-HIV vaccines and further expanded for developing vaccines against emerging pathogens, endemic diseases, chronic infections and cancer.
