Article Excerpt:
TWST: We'd like to begin with a brief historical sketch of Iomai and a picture of the things you're doing at the present time.Mr. Erck: Iomai was founded back in 1997, based upon research conducted at an army research unit called the Walter Reed Army Institute Research. It was there that our founding scientist and our Chief Scientific Officer made the observation that you can deliver proteins to the surface of the skin and set off a potent immune response, allowing you to vaccinate to the skin with just a patch ' a needle free vaccination. The company has developed since 1997 on that premise, taking products into clinical trials and to human studies to show that you can vaccinate with the patch as well as or better than intramuscular injections. The company began as a venture-based company and recently went public earlier this year and has an employee base of approximately 100 employees with four programs in clinical and pre-clinical development.
TWST: Would you tell us about these programs?
Mr. Erck: Three of the programs are based around influenza. The first is
to simply replace the annual flu shot with a flu patch. We've been
working on that program for several years; in fact, we're just filing an
IND on that now, which allows us to begin clinical studies later this
year. The second program takes one of our patches that has an immune
stimulant formulated into the patch and uses it in conjunction with a
standard intramuscular injection in the elderly. With the elderly who
currently get flu vaccines, those flu vaccines work only about half the
time, and by putting an immune stimulant patch on top of that injection
site, we think that you can boost the immune response and increase the
protection in the elderly from flu. The third program is in the area of
Pandemic Influenza, commonly known as Avian or Bird Flu, where we take
that same immune stimulant patch and use it with an injection of a
strain that could be responsible for Pandemic Influenza. It allows you
to do something called dose pairing; it allows you to use a smaller dose
of that vaccine and get a powerful response, and it directly addresses
one of the biggest problems facing us with Pandemic Influenza ' we don't
have the capacity to manufacture enough vaccines. So this in effect
would expand the vaccine capacity by perhaps as much as tenfold or
fiftyfold. The fourth program is a patch that would be a vaccine to
prevent diarrhea in travelers, commonly known as Montezuma's Revenge.
So it targets E. coli-caused diarrhea, which is the most common cause of
bacterial diarrhea.
Tickers included in this excerpt: IOMI
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