Patent of new vaccine platform from Abera Bioscience receives notice of allowance from US patent office
Abera Bioscience AB has received so-called Notice of Allowance of the company’s patent application “ Fusion polypeptides comprising one or more inclusion body tags, methods and uses ” by the US Patent Office (USPTO). The patent forms the basis of a new vaccine platform that the company has developed in parallel with existing platforms. It entails technology that allows the efficient production of disease-specific antigens in so-called protein bodies, nanosized protein particles that can be administered to the body as vaccines.
Abera Bioscience is a Swedish biotechnology company that develops vaccine candidates based on its innovative and proprietary technology platforms. Now the company has developed another platform that makes it possible to efficiently produce single or multiple antigens into so-called protein bodies that can be given as a vaccine. Antigens are the components of vaccines that are supposed to elicit immune responses to protect against infectious pathogens or to combat diseases like cancer. The advantages of protein body-based vaccines include the large amounts of antigens that can be delivered to the body and their nanoparticulate architecture for induction of potent immune responses. Moreover, vaccines based on protein bodies are very fast and cost-effective to produce.
“The vaccine platform that will now receive patent approval in the US, we have worked on for several years in parallel with other technologies. We have used protein bodies as a comparison in many of our vaccine studies and thus gained proof-of-concept for the platform and different ways of delivering those vaccines to the body. It is an exciting technology that makes it possible to create vaccines that are very cost-effective and fast to produce. When developing vaccine candidates, we will now have the opportunity to both test variants based on protein bodies as well as our other platform based on bacterial vesicles. Hence, we will be able to choose the technology platform that is best suited for the unique disease we work with. It gives us a greater opportunity to create effective vaccines against diseases that still lack effective and cost-effective alternatives”, says Maria Alriksson, CEO of Abera Bioscience.
The invention itself is a polypeptide tag that is expressed in fusion with an antigen and induces the accumulation of the fusion product in protein bodies in bacterial expression systems. It allows otherwise soluble or unstable antigens to be produced in protein body fashion. Abera has also applied for supplementary patents for the technology and intends to build a patent family around the innovation and its areas of use.
The application for patent in Europe has also been submitted but is still pending decision by the authorities.