Fort Collins company working on dengue fever shot

Inviragen to begin vaccine trials

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May 19, 2010 - The Coloradoan -A Fort Collins biotech company will begin its first clinical trials of a vaccine against dengue fever, a disease that threatens more than 3.6 billion people living in or traveling to tropical and subtropical regions.

Inviragen, a 2008 graduate of the Rocky Mountain Innovation Initiative in Fort Collins, got the necessary approvals Monday to go ahead with the trials, Inviragen CEO Dan Stinchcomb said.

The technology was developed by researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Vector-Borne Diseases division on Colo-rado State University's Foothills Campus in Fort Collins.

"To have home-grown technology that has progressed from the research bench to clinical trials is a great milestone for Inviragen and the CDC," Stinchcomb said.

The trials, designed to assess the safety of the vaccine, will be conducted at St. Louis University, one of the Vaccine and Treatment Evaluation Units funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which is part of the National Institutes of Health, Stinchcomb said.

"Finding a safe and effective vaccine for dengue is a global health priority," Dr. Sarah George said in a statement.

George is an assistant professor in the division of infectious diseases at St. Louis University and principal investigator of the study.

More than 70 healthy volunteers will be injected with a placebo, a lower dose or higher dose of the vaccine.

Researchers will study whether volunteers tolerate the vaccine or have a reaction such as swelling at the injection site and whether they respond in a way that could prevent dengue, Stinchcomb said.

“The presence of antibodies that can neutralize all four (dengue) viruses will tell us the volunteer is responding to the vaccine in such a way that could be protective,” Stinch-comb said.

If the vaccine proves to be safe and well-tolerated, the vaccine will move on to the second phase of clinical trials, which will test other age groups and responses of people living in endemic countries, he said.


The first clinical human trials are the next step in a long process to get the vaccine approved for global use.

The earliest DenVax could make it to market is 2015, Stinchcomb said. But because dengue fever affects billions of people worldwide, the vaccine has the market potential of billions of dollars “and hopefully will improve public health worldwide,” he said.

Inviragen, which develops vaccines to protect against emerging infectious diseases worldwide, also is working on vaccines for hand, foot and mouth disease and Japanese encephalitis, which kills more people than dengue but occurs in a more-restricted region, Stinchcomb said.

“Since dengue fever is spread around the globe in the tropics and subtropics, 3.6 billion people are living where dengue is endemic,” Stinchcomb said. “That’s half the world. It is a threat to travelers, and the concern is that dengue could move north and get established in the U.S.”

Mexico has seen severe outbreaks that have spread to some people in Texas who have not traveled to Mexico. But it has not become widespread throughout the United States.

Inviragen has been expanding rapidly since leaving the technology incubator in 2008. In October, it merged with a Singapore company and received a $15 million cash infusion from four international venture capital firms.

“This is a great milestone” for a company that merged with Singvax just nine months ago.

“It wouldn’t be possible without the scientific collaboration with CDS, other universities in the U.S. and international vaccine manufacturers and international infectious disease experts,” Stinchcomb said.

Inviragen employs more than a dozen workers in Fort Collins and has offices in Wisconsin and Singapore.