PROVIDENCE – EpiVax Inc., a developer of second-generation vaccines and biotherapeutic agents, today announced it has received a $528,313 Small Business Innovation Research grant to help develop a new treatment for hemophilia.
The money – the latest in more than $3 million in SBIR grants the company has received since its inception – comes from the National Heart Lung and Blood Institute, a component of the National Institutes of Health.
EpiVax is seeking to reengineer Factor VIII, a blood protein that is the agent most commonly used to control bleeding in people with acquired or hereditary hemophilia. “This is an entirely novel approach to improving Factor VIII therapy,” said Dr. Anne De Groot, the company’s president and CEO.
“We hope to make it possible for persons living with hemophilia to avoid a common side effect of FVIII … the development of ‘inhibitors’ to the life-saving therapy,” she said.
The new grant will fund “proof-of-principle” studies, in special strains of mice, to see whether the reengineered FVIII protein avoids the usual antibody responses.
The program will be carried out by EpiVax in collaboration with Dr. David Scott at the University of Maryland and Dr. Ed Forman at the Hasbro Children’s Hospital, whom Epivax said is Rhode Island’s leading expert in the treatment of hemophilia.
EpiVax redesigns proteins by changing the portions of the protein that stimulate an undesired immune response, an approach it calls DeFT, or “Demmunization of Functional Therapeutics.” Computer algorithms help determine which portions of a protein it will attempt to modify.
The new approach “holds great promise,” Forman said, for this “critically important clinical problem.”
EpiVax Inc. is merging bioinformatics with the latest in vitro immunology research to develop “second-generation protein therapeutics,” generating new vaccines for infectious diseases, such as hepatitis, HIV and tuberculosis, and new treatments for cancer and autoimmune diseases. To learn more, visit www.epivax.com.
Read more about the company’s plans in the July 7 print edition of the Providence Business News, or at www.pbn.com/stories/26146.html.
