Conjugate vaccines have been extremely successful in preventing disease and death caused by bacterial infections. The technology is fast, cheap, and highly effective. Intravacc has a 20-year track record in designing, developing, and characterizing conjugate vaccines.
What are conjugate vaccines?
A conjugate vaccine is created by covalently attaching a bacterial polysaccharide or peptide, which by itself is not able to induce immunological memory, to a protein carrier antigen. This results in eliciting a stronger and sustained immunological response. To create effective conjugate vaccines, Intravacc has utilized many carriers. These include tetanus toxoid, diphtheria toxoid (CRM197) and outer membrane vesicles (OMVs).
Intravacc has optimized the isolation of polysaccharides and the length thereof. In addition, we have several methods to conjugate in place that can also be used for synthetic sugar antigens. Intravacc has the expertise to fully characterize conjugate vaccines.
Intravacc’s conjugate platform
Intravacc offers unique capabilities and services to evaluate all production process steps and assess the quality of the vaccine. These include
- fully defined seed lots for R&D and GMP
- USP and DSP
- methods to purify polysaccharides
- conjugation methodology
- mass spectrometry
- colorimetric assays
Ever on the lookout for innovation, we are also investigating conjugation of polysaccharides and peptides to outer membrane vesicles and to synthetic polymers.
Our track record in conjugate vaccines
Intravacc’s Hib vaccine, which has been based on the conjugate platform, has been on the market in India for many years and has saved numerous lives. Intravacc published 6 manuscripts on its Hib vaccine and holds 1 patent family. More recently, Intravacc was part of a consortium to produce a semi-synthetic conjugate vaccine against Shigella flexnerii 2a. Here, Intravacc was responsible for the development and up-scaling of the process and the production of the vaccine for phase I and II clinical studies. This vaccine is currently being tested in phase II clinical trials.