Arrow Therapeutics, the London based anti-infectives drug discovery group, is to work with Acambis plc of Cambridge, UK on novel vaccine discovery.

The collaboration aims to discover attenuated or sub-unit vaccines and will initially involve an evaluation by Acambis of Arrow's proprietary target discovery technology, Transposon Mediated Differential Hybridisation (TMDH).

The agreement includes an upfront payment, milestones and royalties, and covers the development of a novel vaccine for a single pathogen, leaving Arrow free to work on other pathogens with different partners.

TMDH, which was granted a patent at the end of last year, will be used to identify attenuating genes and surface proteins for a potential vaccine candidate against a pathogen selected by Acambis.

Live attenuated vaccines are developed by mutating or deleting genes to weaken bacteria in order to prevent them causing disease whilst still being able to raise a protective immune response. Often multiple genes need to be modified to create an effective vaccine and the identification of appropriate combinations is difficult using current methods. Arrow's technology is sensitive enough to reveal all attenuating genes and levels of attenuation in an organism in just one experiment, enabling rational design of a novel vaccine faster than any other approach. TMDH is also able to identify targets on a cell's surface that could be used to produce sub unit vaccines.

Arrow has also recently attracted a research grant for TMDH worth more than 1 million pounds from the BBSRC/DTI for anti-infective target research in collaboration with the Universities of Newcastle, Cambridge and Oxford.