Vaxil Bio's vaccine candidate progresses to animal testing

The traditional approach to vaccination takes a piece of virus, and uses that to stimulate the immune system to kick it out of the body. Vaxil Bio Therapeutics’ approach uses a signal peptide which recognises viral ‘tags’ on the surface of infected cells, goes into the sick cells and stops them reproducing.

Vaxil has published its research and clinical results, including discovery work done on its VaxHit™ bioinformatics platform in respected, peer-review medical publications, such as the Human Vaccines & Immunotherapeutics Journal and British Journal of Haematology.

When the genomic sequence for the coronavirus was announced in February 2020, Vaxil began conducting a preclinical program to test the efficacy of a COVID-19 vaccine candidate. On 20 July 2020, the company announced that it would begin testing its vaccine candidate on animals, under the guidance of Dr. Hagin, Director of the Allergy and Clinical Immunology Unit at the Tel Aviv Medical Center.

“The collaboration with Dr. Hagin’s team is progressing nicely, […] we have sufficient data to begin our animal study,” said David Goren, Vaxil’s Chairman and Chief Executive Officer. “Though our studies have been designed to reproduce the T-cell proliferation demonstrated in our earlier work, signal peptides are known to behave differently in the lab than in animals, and also in humans.”