GeoVax to Present at Vaccines R&D Conference
During the conference, Dr. Guirakhoo will also serve as a panelist for a session discussing the development of vaccines for the current Ebola crisis.
Presentation to Focus on the Company’s MVA-VLP Platform for Safe and Effective Vaccines for Infectious Diseases and Cancer
ATLANTA, GA, Nov. 14, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- via NEWMEDIAWIRE -- GeoVax Labs, Inc. (OTCQB: GOVX), a biotechnology company specializing in developing human vaccines, announced today that its Chief Scientific Officer, Farshad Guirakhoo, PhD, will be a featured speaker at the Vaccines Research and Development conference, being held November 18-20, 2019 in Boston, Massachusetts. Dr. Guirakhoo will co-chair a session on infectious diseases, during which he will deliver a presentation entitled, MVA as a Safe and Effective Platform for Delivery of Multi-Antigen Vaccine Candidates for Infectious Diseases and Cancer. During the conference, Dr. Guirakhoo will also serve as a panelist for a session discussing the development of vaccines for the current Ebola crisis.
GeoVax’s Modified Vaccinia Ankara (MVA) platform technology is built on a 5th generation MVA vector system that is improved for high expression and stable transgenes during manufacture. Similar to its parent MVA, it has the advantages of being a live replication-competent vector in avian cells for manufacturing, yet replication-deficient in mammalian cells for vaccination, thus inherently safe. Importantly, MVA vaccines elicit protective T cell as well as antibody responses in animals and humans. The GeoVax MVA platform can be combined with the potent immunogenicity of Virus Like Particles (VLPs) (insertion of multiple antigens from each pathogen of interest conferring broad protection) or be used to express proteins in their native conformations, enabling construction of vaccine candidates that induce full protection after a single dose. Built upon this platform, GeoVax’s preventive HIV vaccine has demonstrated robust and durable immune responses in clinical trials involving more than 500 subjects.
Single-dose protection is a favourable characteristic of a vaccine for emerging infectious disease outbreak response, given the speed of spread of pathogens and the impracticality of multi-dose regimens in the under-resourced settings where outbreaks often occur. MVA-VLP vaccine candidates against various virus families (e.g. Ebola, Marburg, Lassa and Zika) induced strong antibody and T cell responses and demonstrated broad protections after single dose vaccinations against lethal challenges. In his presentation, Dr. Guirakhoo will discuss the utility of the platform not only against emerging and re-emerging pathogens but also against cancer or chronic infectious diseases such as HBV, HPV and malaria.
About GeoVax
GeoVax Labs, Inc. is a clinical-stage biotechnology company developing human vaccines against infectious diseases and cancer using a novel patented MVA-VLP based vaccine platform. On this platform, MVA, a large virus capable of carrying several vaccine antigens, expresses proteins that assemble into VLP immunogens within (in vivo) the person receiving the vaccine. The production of VLPs in the person being vaccinated mimics virus production in a natural infection, stimulating both the humoral and cellular arms of the immune system to recognize, prevent, and control the target infection. The MVA-VLP derived vaccines elicit durable immune responses in the host similar to a live-attenuated virus, while providing the safety characteristics of a replication-defective vector.
GeoVax’s current development programs are focused on preventive vaccines against HIV, Zika Virus, hemorrhagic fever viruses (Ebola, Sudan, Marburg, and Lassa), and malaria, as well as therapeutic vaccines against chronic Hepatitis B infections and multiple cancers. The Company has designed the leading preventative HIV vaccine candidate to fight against the subtype of HIV prevalent in the larger commercial markets of the Americas, Western Europe, Japan, and Australia; this program is currently undergoing human clinical trials managed by the HIV Vaccine Trials Network (HVTN) with the support of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). GeoVax’s HIV vaccine is also part of collaborative efforts to develop an immunotherapy as a functional cure for HIV. For more information, visit www.geovax.com.
Contact:
GeoVax Labs, Inc.
678-384-7220
