Under existing grant support from the NIH, AlphaVax has completed the manufacture, testing and release assays of GMP-compliant clinical trial material for a filovirus vaccine candidate at its pilot facility in Lenoir, North Carolina. Further development to advance a multivalent vaccine against Marburg and Ebola viruses into clinical testing is currently under review. Such development will include consideration of the Request for Information (RFI) released by the U.S. Army on January 15, 2010, under which the Department of Defense is seeking companies with the experience and capability to advance Filovirus Vaccine(s) to Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Approval.

The development of an effective prophylactic vaccine against herpes simplex virus (HSV) is a key product opportunity for which the AlphaVax vector platform is ideally suited. [HSV Program]. Recently, studies linking genital HSV infections to increased transmission of HIV identify another important reason to develop a vaccine against HSV. In addition to this longfelt and unmet medical need, the development of an HSV vaccine product fits the overall company strategy of extending our commercial pipeline, exploiting the alphavaccine platform system, and employing our development know-how and proprietary manufacturing processes to quickly advance to clinical trials.

AlphaVax announced today the presentation of promising results from a collaboration with researchers at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC). Pre-clinical studies conducted in the laboratory of Dr. Jedd Wolchok demonstrate the ability of AlphaVax’s virus-like replicon vector particles (VRP) encoding melanoma-specific tumor antigens to reduce tumor burden in a state-of-the-art murine melanoma model.