According to Iliad Biotechnologies, the company has received a 3-year, $1 million grant from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for pre-clinical development of its B-Tech intranasal attenuated B. pertussis vector technology. The grant was made as part of NIAID’s Innovation for Tuberculosis Vaccine Discovery program.
Iliad has been partnered with French research institute Inserm on development of the intranasal B. pertussis vector vaccine since 2014. Other partners under the NIH grant include the Department of Infectious Disease Models for Innovative Therapies at the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) and BioLyo Technologies, a subsidiary of Iliad.
The company said that it is also continuing to advance its BPZE1 intranasal vaccine against pertussis, which has completed Phase 2 studies. Earlier this year, Iliad announced that BPZE1 had received Fast Track designation from the FDA.
Iliad Executive Director of Vaccine Platform Development Peter Goldstein commented, “Iliad’s intranasal B-Tech Vector platform induces immune protection precisely at the point of TB entry, the respiratory tract and lungs, which is promising for the development of a TB vaccine. In addition, our respiratory bacteria-based platform may also have an inherent advantage in its ability to induce immunological protection against other pathogenic respiratory bacteria such as TB.”
Read the Iliad Technologies press release.
