September newsletter – Generic PANDA monium!

by | Oct 2, 2020 | Thinking Out Loud -Blog

Generic PANDAmonium

I have been hanging out with an old dog – eight year old Jack, during the COVID lockdown. If you are a dog during COVID-19, long walks, lots of snuggles on the couch during Zoom meetings, what’s not to like? Hence the theme of my latest talk that is now posted on line – “New Dogs, Old Tricks”.

(And here’s Jack)

In that talk (see below) we rolled out the preliminary data generated during our FDA contract for Immunogenicity Screening of Peptide Generics and their Impurities at the TIDES Virtual 2020 Conference in mid-September. The webinar was recorded and is available here! The data is not yet published, Brian’s working on that!

Meanwhile it’s PANDA-monium at EpiVax, actually, due to all of the new customers that want to know about the immunogenicity of their peptide drug impurities. We’re happy to help and yes – while taking precautions for COVID-19 –  the lab is super busy doing validation studies for our in silico analyses. We even developed a new tool – called the “What-If-Machine (WhIM). More about that next month …

So, you want to know –  What’s the skinny? Some peptide drugs may contain potentially tolerogenic Epitopes! Yes, those pesky Tregitopes keep coming back – So for all the Tregitope fans out there, find out more by watching the TIDES recording below … or …

…. If you’d like to join us for the next presentation of our data, Save The Date for our Live PANDA Webinar coming up October 7th!

EpiVax’s SARS-CoV-2 Vaccine Update

Webinars and more webinars! We also held an update on EPV-CoV-19, our peptide T cell epitope vaccine to update investors on the status of our EPV-CoV-19 Healthcare Worker Vaccine. If you missed the live event, you may register here to receive a link to the recording.

Check out our recent publication: an opinion paper on the importance of T cell immunity in the resolution of SARS-CoV-2 infection: Exploit T cell Immunity for Rapid, Safe., and Effective COVID-19 Vaccine

Making Strides in Avian Asian H7N9 Immune
Engineering Better Vaccines for Flu

Meanwhile, back in Georgia … Did you know that I have a new position as a professor in the Center for Vaccines and Immunology? Where Lenny Moise (also newly annointed UGA professor) has been busy working with center director  Ted Ross to prove that immune -engineering does actually improve the efficacy of vaccines. Here, we focused on immune-engineering H7N9 influenza hemagglutinin and we showed that it improved protection against viral influenza virus challenge in mice.

You can read the full publication here. Oh, and don’t forget our publication on IVAX, the vaccine design Toolkit. It’s Hot Hot Hot – Here is the link to the open access PDF.