Jim Wilson at the WuXi Global Forum, JPM20

Gates Foun­da­tion backs gene ther­a­py pi­o­neer­s' sec­ond-gen Covid-19 vac­cine

The Gates Foun­da­tion has backed an­oth­er ear­ly-stage vac­cine ef­fort, hand­ing up to $2.1 mil­lion to a pre-clin­i­cal can­di­date from a pair of gene ther­a­py pi­o­neers they think can of­fer ben­e­fits over the first wave of Covid-19 vac­cines now rolling out around the globe.

The mon­ey will help ad­vance a vac­cine Luk Van­den­berghe and Jim Wil­son, di­rec­tors of the gene ther­a­py cen­ters at Mass­a­chu­setts Eye and Ear and the Uni­ver­si­ty of Penn­syl­va­nia, have been de­vel­op­ing over the past year based on the AAV vec­tors com­mon­ly used in gene ther­a­py. Now in non-hu­man pri­mate chal­lenge stud­ies, ear­ly da­ta sug­gest the vac­cine may work as a sin­gle dose and re­main sta­ble at room tem­per­a­ture, ad­dress­ing two of the dif­fi­cul­ties with rolling out the cur­rent gen­er­a­tion of vac­cines around the globe.

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