Meissa Vaccines announced it has been awarded a Phase 1 SBIR grant by the National Institutes of Health entitled "Development of polyvalent inactivated rhinovirus vaccine." The grant will allow Meissa to advance its second product candidate towards an IND, by funding the generation of multiple rhinovirus serotypes and the development of innovative analytical tests to identify and quantify each serotype in the multivalent vaccine. Rhinoviruses are the predominant cause of the common cold.
"We are delighted with this award, especially because NIH was only able to fund one in eight Phase 1 SBIR applications in fiscal 2016,” Dr. Roderick Tang, Meissa's Chief Scientific Officer and Principal Investigator on the grant said. “Rhinovirus has attractive characteristics as a target for vaccine development, including the ability to test for efficacy early in clinical development with a human challenge model."
Meissa's rhinovirus vaccine candidate is based on research carried out in Dr. Moore's laboratory at Emory University.