18 September 2020 - - US-based vaccine biotechnology company Ufovax, LLC is touting an advancement toward Phase I clinical trials of its next-generation SARS-CoV-2 vaccine candidate, the company said.

Ufovax is a vaccine biotechnology company based on the patented One-component Self-Assembling protein NanoParticle (1c-SApNP) vaccine design and manufacturing platform invented by Associate Professor Jiang Zhu, PhD, of Scripps Research (La Jolla, CA).

Ufovax holds an exclusive global license to the Scripps Intellectual Property covering its platform and several vaccines, including COVID-19.

In a publication submitted Monday, September 14 (now available on the bioRxiv preprint server), the authors present a systematic study on rational vaccine design and evaluation of vaccine response in mice.

In particular, they propose a new spike antigen design (S2GΔHR2) and displayed it on several SApNPs as COVID-19 vaccine candidates.

This spike is missing the highly flexible heptad repeat 2 stalk which, as recently reported in several independent publications, is considered a major cause of spike metastability.

This metastability is the mechanism responsible for masking the COVID-19 spike from immune recognition and allowing very efficient human infection.

Over the past two years Zhu has been a co-investigator on two NIH-supported projects focusing on coronavirus (SARS-CoV-1 and MERS-CoV) vaccine development.

Since the outbreak, Zhu and his team, sponsored by Ufovax, have worked tirelessly to create a 1c-SApNP vaccine against SARS-CoV-2, using the novel multilayered protein nanoparticle design described in another recent publication.

Ufovax is a privately held biotechnology company currently focused on the development of protein nanoparticle vaccines for infectious diseases and has a pipeline of eight additional vaccines in pre-clinical development.