Washington Editor
New government grants are providing Maxygen Inc. with $14.4 million to further its HIV vaccine research efforts.
Specifically, the company received two competitive awards from the National Institutes of Health, as well as a contract from the Department of Defense. The NIH funding includes $11.7 million over five years as part of the HIV Research and Development program and a Phase I grant from its Small Business Innovation Research program. The DoD contract is worth $2.4 million.
"We've been working on HIV for quite a while," said Jeanine Medeiros, the company's director of investor relations, though she noted that the program remains far from Maxygen's core focus of improving protein therapeutics. Still, the federal funding represents a suitable incentive for the company to further its research into "an area that we're familiar with," Medeiros told BioWorld Today. That familiarity stems in part from prior collaborations with the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative and the Scripps Research Institute, as well as previous government funding.
All the work is centered on developing a preventative vaccine, and in particular, a prophylaxis "that protects against multiple strains of the HIV virus," Medeiros added. In fact, all the Redwood City, Calif.-based company's HIV research to date has focused on a multivalent vaccine.
The HIV Research and Development grant provides funds for the use of Maxygen's MolecularBreeding platform to generate new HIV-1 antigens potentially capable of inducing broad responses to multiple strains of the virus. The technology allows for the modification of clinical properties of genes through recombination at the genetic level to produce libraries of new genes with desired properties. The SBIR award will fund investigations into the effect on immunogenicity of secondary modifications to a specific HIV-1 envelope protein. The DoD contract will fund work to develop a high-throughput vaccine screening platform.
In all those government-funded projects, Maxygen expects to work with Monogram Biosciences Inc. (formerly ViroLogic Inc., of South San Francisco), and Aldevron LLC, of Fargo, N.D. With the latter, Maxygen will be developing a high-throughput screening platform as part of a broad HIV vaccine development consortium to which the three companies belong.
As the early research begins to move forward, Maxygen continues to focus its primary efforts on its protein pharmaceutical candidates. Its lead product, which is partnered with F. Hoffmann-La Roche Ltd. in Basel, Switzerland, is a next-generation interferon alpha product being positioned as a successor to Pegasys. Earlier this year, Maxygen received a preclinical milestone payment from Roche, which is responsible for funding the hepatitis C program and plans to file an investigational new drug application next year.
On its own, Maxygen is advancing a next-generation granulocyte-colony stimulating factor product for neutropenia. Being developed for administration once per chemotherapy cycle, it is designed to shorten the duration of neutropenia, and in animal models has done so 20 percent to 25 percent faster than EPO (Neulasta, from Amgen Inc.) Maxygen plans to file an IND application next year.
Further down in its portfolio is a next-generation Factor VII blood-clotting product for several indications, including hemophilia and trauma. Also still in preclinical development, its IND schedule has not been disclosed.
The company's cash reserves were $198.9 million June 30, before which it posted a $9.9 million quarterly net loss. Friday, its shares (NASDAQ:MAXY) gained 1 cent to close at $7.51.
