The Swedish pharma company Orexo and biotech firm Abera Bioscience announced today that they have joined forces to develop mucosal vaccines, including an influenza vaccine candidate. The collaboration will leverage Orexo’s scalable AmorphOX powder-based drug delivery technology and Abera’s expertise in vaccine development.
As a first step, the companies will work on developing powder-based intranasal vaccines based on Abera’s influenza vaccine candidate. Although there are hundreds of millions of influenza cases worldwide every year, most of them aren’t serious. Nevertheless, an estimated three to five million cases are severe, resulting in up to 650,000 deaths annually.
Orexo and Abera believe that an intranasal influenza vaccine could increase access to a vaccine, and thereby effectively prevent the disease from speading and reduce infections.
“Influenza is a family of viruses that could mutate and cause the next pandemic, but seasonal influenza is already a major problem where vaccines are often not effective enough,” explained Maria Alriksson, CEO of Abera, in a press statement.
“Orexo has an impressive knowledge and technology for powder formulations of medicines that perfectly complements our expertise in vaccine development. Their innovative technology, AmorphOX, has shown to improve the properties of a wide range of different active ingredients. There is therefore great potential in this area, and we will be able to take many important development steps in the coming year.”
Orexo’s AmorphOX aims to boost the characteristics of new or existing drugs through formulations that can stabilize the active ingredients – including small molecules, peptides, and large biomolecules, such as vaccines – and improve the way they are administered.
Abera’s vaccine platform, BERA, is based on outer membrane vesicles (OMVS), bacterial particles that carry various disease-specific antigens. As antigens can be exchanged in a “plug-and-play manner”, the platform enables fast development of new vaccines candidates. Vaccines developed through the BERA platform can create protection against diseases and disease transmission in mucosal membranes and within the body. The vaccines can be administered via nasal sprays, which are seen as advantageous over injections.
Speaking of the recent collaboration announcement, Robert Rönn, SVP and Head of R&D at Orexo, said in a press release: “Abera has an innovative and promising vaccine platform for the development of mucosal vaccines[...] The collaboration is fully in line with our strategic development of the AmorphOX® platform and through collaborations we can showcase the potential and value of our technology. We look forward to working with Abera, where our experience and technologies are highly complementary.”
