Acacia Research Corporation's CombiMatrix group is collaborating with Novavax on development of a technique for in-process monitoring of vaccine production.

CombiMatrix is developing a technique designed to improve the process of synthetic vaccine production by tracking the genetic fidelity of the genes encoding the vaccine in the fermentation process. Such a method would be a significant advance for large-scale synthetic production processes and could help speed FDA regulatory processes. The method is designed to be both inexpensive and fast. CombiMatrix and Novavax are now collaborating to test efficacy of the method on Novavax's VLP process for producing H5N1 bird-flu vaccine, informs a company release.

Traditional flu-vaccine development involves an arcane process of viral amplification in chicken eggs, followed by a lengthy process of inactivation, sterilization, and packaging. This method is very time consuming and does not allow rapid response to quickly evolving threats. In the case of H5N1 bird flu, the threat is that the strain now present will mutate or recombine to form a new strain that will be easily transmissible among humans and have high mortality rates. If such a new strain appears, traditional flu-vaccine development and production will likely be too slow to ramp up to cover the world's need

"CombiMatrix's belief is that, for a variety of reasons, the world needs the ability to design new vaccines and to produce them much more rapidly than it can today. Reasons include the possibility of rapidly evolving natural threats such as bird flu and SARS as well as increased terrorist activity throughout the world. Novavax is working on technology to greatly speed vaccine development and production. Now CombiMatrix has the potential to make contributions to vaccine response as well. This procedure will be useful for other vaccine development programs in the future. This collaboration fits synergistically with our efforts in DNA arrays, defence-related work, drug development, and diagnostics," said Amit Kumar, president and CEO of CombiMatrix

Acacia Research Corporation comprises two operating groups: Acacia Technologies Group and CombiMatrix Group.

The CombiMatrix group is developing a platform technology to rapidly produce customisable arrays, which are semiconductor-based tools for use in identifying and determining the roles of genes, gene mutations and proteins. Its technology has a wide range of potential applications in the areas of genomics, proteomics, biosensors, drug discovery, drug development, diagnostics, combinatorial chemistry, material sciences and nanotechnology.