BALTIMORE – Profectus BioSciences Inc., a company developing vaccines to treat and prevent chronic viral diseases such as AIDS, has won $3.1 million in National Institute of Health grants. The company also received NIH collaborative grants to Dr. Robert Gallo, director of the Institute of Human Virology of the University of Maryland School of Medicine.

The grants support the development of the company’s Transition State Vaccine (TSV) technology for a prophylactic HIV Vaccine.

The company harnesses the human immune system to treat and prevent viral diseases and cancers via its proprietary vaccines.

Originally developed at the IHV, the TSV strategy targets the adaptive immune response to the most protected portions of HIV envelope spikes that are considered the “Achilles heel” of all HIV isolates.

The TSV is being developed as a subunit protein and also for delivery utilizing the Company’s plasmid DNA and recombinant Vesicular Stomatitis Virus vaccine vectors. Thus far, the TSV approach has generated significant protective responses in several non-human primate models for HIV.

Its unfortunate that many attempts to develop an effective HIV vaccine have so far had poor results in human trials. New approaches–such as that of Profectus, may eventually have better results.

Numerous Southeast companies are working on ways to fire up the human immune system to battle cancers. While results have been promising for some, the slow movement through the pre-clinical and clinical trial process means we probably won’t see any of them hit the market for a good many years yet.

But we think the increased knowledge of how to bring the immune system to bear on fighting AIDS, cancers, and other diseases is going to have revolutionary results in future medicine.

To email TJS Editor/writer Allan Maurer: Allan at TechJournalSouth dot com.