바이오스펙테이터

by Jongwon Jang

▲An MOU signing ceremony was attended by executives from both parties.

GI Innovation Inc., a South Korean bio-venture company, announced a new collaboration with the International Vaccine Institute (IVI), to support global efforts to develop vaccines against COVID-19 and influenza viruses. In this new move, GI Innovation will make its pandemic vaccine adjuvant platform technology available to accelerate the development of an effective vaccine against COVID-19. As of April 8, the virus has infected more than 1.4 million people, and killed over 82,000 worldwide.

The agreement with GI Innovation will enable IVI to delineate the advantages of GI Innovation’s adjuvant platform towards developing new COVID-19 and influenza vaccines.

In recent years, the importance of adjuvants in the development of purified subunit or synthetic vaccines has become clear. Vaccines of this type are often poor at eliciting the strong immune response needed to prevent infection and require such adjuvants to evoke a stronger and longer lasting immunity against invading pathogens. Vaccines work by mimicking antigens, which are structural features unique to each pathogen type.

Adjuvants are essential to the induction of proper preventive immunity, especially against poorly immunogenic antigens or when only a small amount of antigen is present. One issue with the use of adjuvants is potential toxicity which can cause adverse side effects. Because vaccines are widely used to prevent infection in otherwise healthy persons, safety is paramount. When integrated correctly, adjuvants can play a crucial role in pandemic situations, as they help the immune system to more effectively recognize the antigens present in vaccines – improving the speed of onset, magnitude or durability of immune responses to vaccine. They can also help to reduce the amount of antigen required per dose, enabling more people to be vaccinated.

The safety of GI Innovation’s adjuvant platform has been examined and confirmed through various preclinical toxicity studies. For further confirmation, a human clinical study is scheduled for the second half of this year.

Vaccines are highly cost-effective because they can prevent diseases before they spread. Recently, vaccine development has rapidly expanded into the area of disease treatment for not only infectious diseases but also chronic diseases like cancer and autoimmune diseases. The research collaboration between GI Innovation and IVI is expected to shed further light on how to improve the efficacy of numerous vaccines under development.

IVI Director General, Dr. Jerome Kim, said, “In the wake of the most devastating pandemic in more than 100 years, the importance of vaccines is clearer than ever. Adjuvants could also play a pivotal role in immunizing as many people as possible. This partnership is expected to allow IVI and GI Innovation to accelerate the development of adjuvants that can be applied for vaccines against COVID-19 and other emerging viruses, as well as influenza.”

“We are confident in the core value of our adjuvant platform,” GI Innovation’s Founder & CSO, Dr. Myoung Ho Jang said. “It has broad applications in the development of promising vaccines to rapidly respond to epidemics like COVID-19, which has been devastating to the entire global community”. Evidence shows that GI Innovation’s adjuvant platform does not elicit dangerous ‘cytokine storms’ because it selectively enhances the proliferation and activation of natural killer cells (NK cells) and cytotoxic T cells (CD8+ T cells), which are key to the human body’s anti-viral defense.