Ichor Medical Systems Inc., a San Diego-based biotech, recently was awarded funding potentially worth $20.2 million over five years from a national defense organization to develop a special kind of immunization to protect U.S. military members and the general population against biological threats.
The contract is through the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and supported by the U.S. Army Research Office for a base period award of $8.6 million with the ability to total $20.2 million over five years with milestone payments.
The funding will support the development and clinical assessment of Ichor’s patented technology, TriGrid. The technology uses electrical pulses to form pores and pathways through a cell’s membrane for a brief period of time. This “electroporation” technology can be used to put antibodies that fight disease directly into a person’s immune system without exposing the person to potentially harmful pathogens.
Active immunization, like the flu shot, exposes the patient to a weak version of a pathogen so that the person’s immune system can build up antibodies in response to the invading bacterium or virus. The key is to inject such a feeble version of the pathogen that the body can easily defeat it and build up antibodies for future exposure.
This tactic works well for influenza. However, some pathogens are too dangerous to be injected into humans. Take the Ebola virus, for example.
“If exposed to Ebola, the body may not create an immune response fast enough to fight the virus,” said May
Pidding, director of business development at Ichor.
It appears that companies looking for treatments for Ebola would agree. Mapp Biopharmaceutical Inc. is growing antibodies to fight the deadly Ebola virus in a tobacco plant rather than a human. Unfortunately, incubating antibodies in a plant is a lengthy process. After the antibodies develop, the “antibody cocktail” has to be purified before it can go to production — hence the delay in Mapp’s ability to provide more of its drug, ZMapp.
Pidding said that Ichor’s TriGrid technology can take out some of this waiting time by injecting the antibodies directly into the body, rather than stimulating the body to create its own antibodies or growing antibodies in plants.
Deployable Antibodies
“You’re using the person as the biomanufacturer,” she said. “You don’t have to go through purification and all those other steps because the antibody is going straight to the end user.”
This process can be used to get antibodies into the body for any pathogen in which the antibody sequence is known. Pidding said it could be used to potentially treat many illnesses from Ebola and malaria to the West Nile virus.
“Terrorist groups could spread disease somewhere as a bioterror weapon,” Pidding said. “So the army and military have a program to start these prophylactic therapies — or therapies to prevent disease.”
The award is part of a DARPA program called Adept Protect aimed at developing new platform technologies that could be safely and rapidly deployed to the U.S. population and military personnel to provide immediate protection in the event of an infectious outbreak or biological weapons attack. While active immunization with traditional vaccines is effective at stimulating the immune system to generate protective antibodies, such responses are not immediate and may require multiple doses of the vaccine.
Ichor has received about $25 million in grants from the National Institutes of Health and the U.S. Department of Defense, along with this latest installment of the upfront $8.6 million from DARPA for the development of TriGrid.
Broad Applications
“We are excited for this new opportunity with the Department of Defense to apply the TriGrid technology to another area of high priority for national security,” said Ichor CEO Bob Bernard. “Whether to address unknown bioterrorist threats or pandemic disease, success of this approach would revamp traditional vaccine processes and position the TriGrid favorably for use in other broad spectrum biodefense and pandemic applications.”
Ichor, a privately-held company founded in 1994, is collaborating with partners to provide its TriGrid platform as a means for delivery of DNA drugs and vaccines in disease indications such as melanoma, malaria, hepatitis infection, human papilloma virus, human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection, Ebola, as well as for multiple biodefense agents.