Blue Water Vaccines Inc, a biopharmaceutical company focused on creating transformative vaccines, has signed an exclusive worldwide license agreement with St Jude Children's Research Hospital, a United States hospital dedicated to understanding, treating and curing childhood cancer and other life-threatening diseases, it was reported on Monday.

The contract has been signed for the development of a Streptococcus Pneumoniae vaccine. The technology was developed in the laboratory of Jason Rosch, PhD, Department of Infectious Diseases at St Jude.

Rosch said, 'We sought to generate a novel class of live vaccines that are fully attenuated and retain all major antigenic virulence proteins. A live vaccine candidate based on deletion of the signal recognition pathway component ftsY induced potent, serotype-independent protection against otitis media, sinusitis, pneumonia and invasive pneumococcal disease.'