Maxygen, Inc., a biotechnology company focused on the development of improved protein drugs, announced that it has been awarded a 2-year, $3.4 million grant from the United States Department of Defense to develop technology to advance vaccine research and development.

Under the grant, Maxygen will continue development of ParallelaVax technology for rapid generation of vaccine candidates and high-throughput testing in animal models. The work will be done in collaboration with Aldevron LLC.

Maxygen has vaccine programmes in the areas of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), influenza, and encephalitic alphaviruses, which are funded through various external agencies. Maxygen researchers have generated thousands of lead candidates for these vaccine programs using Maxygen's MolecularBreeding platform. The ParallelaVax technology is being developed in collaboration with Aldevron to enable high-throughput testing of these vaccine candidates in animal models. By creating multiple vaccine leads in parallel, the companies hope to increase the odds of successfully advancing promising vaccines into late stage clinical trials.

"Combining our MolecularBreeding platform and the ParallelaVax technology may solve some of the fundamental problems with vaccine development," said Russell Howard, chief executive officer of Maxygen. "We are pleased that the government will continue to fund this important work while Maxygen maintains its focus on the business of developing novel protein therapeutics."

The companies are also working on a separate project to develop an analogous platform for human clinical trials, called Paraclin, which will enable rapid screening of vaccine candidates in humans. The goal of this work is to lower the time, cost, and risk of vaccine clinical trials.

The grant announced today allows Maxygen to continue work done under a previous contract with the Department of Defense and partner with the Joint Program Executive Office for Chemical and Biological Defense (JPEO-CBD), Chemical Biological Medical Systems Joint Project Management Office in developing vaccine systems used to protect military personnel from biological agents. Maxygen has been using its HIV vaccine program as the model for development of the technology. To date, the program has achieved a number of successes, including the creation of a shuffled gp120 HIV-1 envelope protein with broader activity against a number of HIV-1 virus strains compared to wild-type gp120 protein. The company has also identified multiple variants with increased activity relative to specific HIV strains.

Maxygen's HIV programme is also being funded by the US government's National Institutes of Health's (NIH) National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) HIV Research and Development (HIVRAD) program and the NIH Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program. The company has also received SBIR funding for the development of vaccines against influenza and encephalitic alphaviruses.

MolecularBreeding directed evolution platform uses a process of shuffling gene fragments in a test tube and allowing the fragments to recombine randomly to form new genes. The products of these recombined genes (proteins) are then screened for the targeted drug properties. Genes for the selected proteins can then be reshuffled and screened in an iterative process that ultimately results in a final protein with the desired product profile. This novel platform allows scientists to exploit gene variation, which can result in unique drug targets or novel therapeutic protein candidates.

ParallelaVax Rapid Vaccine Testing Technology is a system for the rapid and cost-effective high-throughput testing of vaccine candidates in animals. ParallelaVax Technology helps researchers identify multiple lead candidates for further development. As candidates progress through further testing in non-human primates and "first-in-human" studies, those vaccines that are ineffective will drop out. The existence of multiple candidates makes it unnecessary to return to the initial step of vaccine candidate discovery, thus saving time and money.

Maxygen is a biopharmaceutical company focused on developing improved versions of protein drugs. The company's lead program, MAXY-G34, is designed to be an improved long-acting G-CSF for the treatment of neutropenia.