Single-dose vaccine platform for HIV, Zika, and Ebola

Finally, after months and years of slogging the scientific community worldwide has achieved a major breakthrough. There is now a new vaccine platform, ‘Plug and play’, offering single dose vaccines to fully protect from today’ emerging infectious diseases – HIV, Zika, Lassa fever, and Ebola. Biotechnology company GeoVax that’s headquartered in Atlanta, USA announced recently.

How does this vaccine works?

“Unlike other vaccine technologies currently available, which sacrifice confidence in success for speed or vice-versa, the GeoVax technology offers a true ‘Plug and Play’ platform approach that is well suited for use against a wide range of biological threats and amenable to rapid, large-scale production,” said Rahul Basu, scientist at GeoVax and lead author on the study.

Vaccines produced in this platform are nicely immunogenic and work against a wide range of indications. Besides, the vaccines are fit for repeated use and you can well store them at refrigerator temperatures. Hospitals can scale up the shots for use in both epidemic response and routine vaccination. The dose responds fully and rapidly to biological threats.

In proof-of-concept studies, the researchers tested three independent vaccines against three families of viruses. Each vaccine showed cent percent protection after a single dose, using different lethal challenge models.

“To demonstrate a broad utility of the platform, we developed prophylactic and therapeutic vaccines for other infectious diseases as well as cancer,” said Mr. Basu. These included prophylactic and therapeutic vaccines for HIV (already in advanced clinical trials), preventive vaccines for Marburg virus, Sudan virus, and Malaria. All these diseases actually have epidemic potential with high human lethality. They team also developed therapeutic vaccines for chronic Hepatitis B infections and tumor-associated antigen (TAA)-based-cancer vaccines.

An impressive line-up of global laboratories and firms supported these studies on single-dose vaccines for emerging infectious diseases were supported with funding from various global laboratories.