Consortium awarded €8.4 million for development of thermo stable and cold-chain independent virosome-based vaccines

Mymetics Corporation, a pioneer in the research and development of virosome-based vaccines to prevent transmission of human infectious diseases, has announced that its subsidiary Mymetics BV in the Netherlands is leading a consortium that has been selected to receive project grants with a total value of €8.4 million.

A total of €5.3 million is funded as part of Horizon 2020 and up to €3.1 million of funding will be provided by the Swiss State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation (SERI) for the Swiss based consortium partners. The grants will fund the evaluation, development and manufacturing scale-up of thermo stable and cold-chain independent nano-pharmaceutical virosome-based vaccine candidates.

Of the total amount, €3.4 million is directly attributable to Mymetics activities, with the balance going to the consortium partners, Catalent UK Swindon Zydis Ltd., Chimera Biotec GmbH, Upperton Ltd. and Bachem AG.

Global need for vaccines that are stable temperature

“With more than 90% of the existing vaccines dependent on the cold-chain and the resulting detrimental impact on availability, efficacy and costs of these vaccines in developing countries, there is an undisputable need to innovate and manufacture vaccines that are stable and temperature independent” commented Ronald Kempers, CEO of Mymetics. “We are very pleased that our virosome vaccine technology and know-how has been recognised together with the skills and expertise of our EU consortium partners.  Funding this project can represent a major innovation in vaccine development.”

Project aims to develop a scalable manufacturing process for thermo stable and cold-chain independent virosome-based vaccines

The EU Horizon 2020 project is named MACIVIVA, which stands for “Manufacturing process for Cold-chain Independent Virosome-based Vaccines”. The project duration is in total 3.5 years and brings together the leading contract manufacturers and the relevant expertise for spray drying, freeze drying and analytical techniques from the pharmaceutical industry to develop a scalable manufacturing process to achieve thermo stable and cold-chain independent virosome based vaccines.

Dr. Sylvain Fleury, Mymetics CSO and overall MACIVIVA project coordinator stated, “We are very thankful for the EU Horizon 2020 and Swiss funding organizations to finance this very important innovation project in the world of vaccines. We look forward to work with our consortium partners to start the efforts on our promising virosome-based HIV vaccine candidate, with the overall objective to make this scalable and applicable for all our virosome based vaccines”.

The MACIVIVA project will receive €5.3 million funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under Grant Agreement No 646122.