Aphios
Corporation Granted NIH Support for Development of Novel
HIV Therapeutic Vaccine
August
08, 1998
— Aphios Corporation has been awarded a Phase I SBIR
Grant from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious
Diseases (NIAID) to develop a novel therapeutic HIV vaccine.
Aphios will address concerns about safety, effectiveness
and cost by utilizing an extremely effective virus inactivation
technology, SuperFluids™ CFI.
Currently,
significant breakthroughs on AIDS treatment and in basic
research on HIV, and the use of drug cocktail mixtures have
proven to be quite effective in lowering the viral load
in infected patients, thus slowing the progression of AIDS.
However, available cocktail mixtures are quite expensive,
costing an estimated $ 10,000 to $ 12,000 U.S. per year.
As such, a minimal number of HIV-infected patients can afford
these cocktail treatments. It is estimated that over 90%
of the 23 million HIV-infected people live in less developed
countries and have very limited access to available therapies.
There are also significant concerns about the long term
efficacy of the new cocktail therapies.
Aphios
is developing and testing novel HIV therapeutic vaccines
as alternate, more effective and less expensive interdictions
for HIV and AIDS. Our therapeutic vaccines are being developed
by utilizing an extremely effective virus inactivation technology
which has negligible impact on antigen integrity activity.
Our vaccines are being developed from nef denuded
and other attenuated HIV particles for a greater degree
of safety, and from cocktail mixtures of different HIV strains
for a higher degree of efficacy. Our HIV vaccine manufacturing
technology is quite inexpensive, amenable to large-scale
processing, portable and can be readily implemented in a
host country site.
The
proprietary SuperFluids™ CFI virus inactivation technique
is based on advanced liquid-liquid technology using
supercritical or near-critical fluids with or without cosolvents
for the gentle and rapid inactivation of both enveloped
and non-enveloped viruses without any significant alteration
of product quality and biological activity. By judicious
selection of SuperFluids™ type and conditions, virus
particles are effectively inactivated.
Conventional
techniques that are used to inactivate HIV have included
formalin treatment, detergent disruption, exposure to psoralen
and ultraviolet light, and treatment with Beta-propiolactone.
Such methods are known to denature protein, chemically modify
protein and nucleic acid, disrupt macromolecular interactions,
and otherwise decrease biological activity and antigenicity.
CFI does not destroy the essential native structure
of proteins and does not involve the use of carcinogenic
or toxic substances. Because CFI inactivates enveloped
viruses while retaining the integrity of proteins, this
novel technology presents great potential for the development
of an effective HIV vaccine.
Aphios,
a privately held R&D company headquartered in Woburn,
Mass., tel: (781) 932-6933, aphios@aol.com,
offers unique, rapid and generally applicable virus-free
products, as well as novel, non-toxic and cost-effective
medical advances to market using its proprietary and innovative
SuperFluids™ CFI technology.
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