• Funding to prepare Mymetics’ cold chain-independent needle-free mucosal virosome HIV vaccine candidate for clinical trials


• Collaboration with Texas Biomedical Institute and University of Louisiana at Lafayette


• Total award USD 8.67 million over 5 years, with USD 1.9 million budget in the first year

 

Epalinges, Switzerland, April 29, 2019 – Mymetics Corporation (OTCQB: MYMX), a pioneer and leader in the research and development of virosome-based vaccines against life threatening and life disabling diseases, announced today that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has awarded Mymetics and Texas Biomedical Research Institute (Texas Biomed) a five-year grant for the project called “Cold Chain-independent, Needle-free Mucosal Virosomal Vaccine to Prevent HIV-1 Acquisition at Mucosal Levels”.
The project has the objective to prepare Mymetics’ promising HIV-1 vaccine candidate for clinical trials. The vaccine candidate is based upon Mymetics’ virosomes, enveloped virus-like particles that display on their surface rationally designed HIV-1 antigens. The vaccine is created to induce protective mucosal antibodies acting as a frontline defense against sexual HIV transmission. An earlier formulation of the vaccine candidate has shown safety and immunogenicity in a Phase I clinical trial in healthy women. Two independent non-human primate studies demonstrated the safety and high efficacy of the virosome-based vaccine in Chinese and Indian-origin rhesus macaques against repeated low-dose intravaginal challenges with a monkey AIDS virus, a so-called tier 2 R5 SHIV that shares key biological features with human transmitted forms of HIV-1. Mymetics recently finished a European Horizon 2020 funded project where Mymetics developed adjuvanted new solid powder forms of the vaccine which can be directly administered to mucosal tissues (nose, sublingual or oral) without needles and that do not depend on refrigeration, which makes the new vaccine attractive for the developing world where AIDS is at epidemic levels.

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