Maxygen Inc has been awarded grants and a contract totaling $14.4 million from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the United States department of defence to advance research for development of a preventative HIV vaccine. The NIH has awarded Maxygen two competitive grants including $11.7 million over 5 years as part of the HIV research and development programme (HIVRAD) and a Phase I grant from the NIH Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) programme. Maxygen was also awarded a contract of $2.4 million from the Department of Defence for HIV vaccine discovery.

The HIVRAD grant provides funds for the use of Maxygen's MolecularBreeding directed evolution platform to generate novel HIV-1 antigens potentially capable of inducing broad antibody responses to multiple strains of the HIV-1 virus. The SBIR award will fund investigations into the effect on immunogenicity of secondary modifications to a specific HIV-1 envelope protein. The contract from the department of defence will fund work to develop a high-throughput vaccine screening platform. Maxygen anticipates working in collaboration with Monogram Biosciences and Aldevron LLC with respect to these government-funded projects, claims a company release.

"While Maxygen is focusing its resources on the advancement of its protein pharmaceutical product candidates, we believe that our MolecularBreeding directed molecular evolution technologies hold great promise for the development of novel vaccines. We are pleased to be able to advance our work in HIV vaccine discovery with government grant and contract funding. Maxygen has demonstrated the ability to improve key attributes of experimental vaccines to make them more effective against multiple pathogen strains in laboratory studies. We hope to translate our past success in the laboratory into a much needed broadly-protective HIV vaccine," said Russell Howard, CEO of Maxygen.

Maxygen Inc is focused on the development of superior versions of validated major protein pharmaceuticals. Maxygen's technologies bring together advances in molecular biology and protein modification to create novel biotechnology products.