“Platform Vaccine technology is like a pod beverage maker,” animal health vaccine company Medgene said at a press conference at World Pork Expo. “Significant resources have gone into creating the maker so it can produce a wide variety of beverages as they’re needed, quickly and economically. Just pick a pod, brew a beverage. It’s fast, and it’s exactly what you want. Animal Health vaccines made with Platform technology are similar.”
The USDA Center for Veterinary Biologics (CVB) recently awarded Medgene license to produce and market a USDA-approved Platform vaccine to the pork industry. The awarded license applies to use of their Platform technology to produce vaccines that address disease targets such as rotavirus, porcine circovirus, influenza A and sapovirus.
“If you think about it, just like a pod coffeemaker, all we’re really doing is using our platform to make vaccines that can approach these viral targets that are causing problems in the swine population,” says Andy Smythe, national sales manager for Medgene.
Medgene creates the relevant vaccine formulations based upon what’s circulating in the population. As that circulation or the disease pressure evolves and changes, the company says they can move along with it.
“Just like if you want to change the pod for your coffee to a hazelnut this morning,” Smythe says. “We have that ability to do so. Part of our business strategy at Medgene is to identify those gaps that traditional vaccines have not been able to approach, and then use our next-generation platform to approach those economically significant diseases.”
This platform technology is safely and easily adapted to multiple animal disease targets. At the moment, Smythe says the viral platform in swine is focused on four key diseases: rotavirus, influenza, circovirus, and sapovirus. However, there are others they can use their platform to approach.
The result is the development of vaccines and an understanding of how diseases move within species and geography within a fraction of the time of traditional vaccine approaches, the company says. The technology allows Medgene flexibility to work with veterinarians to manufacture vaccines with single or multiple viral formulations and/or combinations of viral targets from multiple diseases.
Significant inputs of research, testing and regulatory oversight prove the integral platform of a vaccine production technology is safe and replicable, Medgene explained.
“The pork industry’s importance to our nation’s food supply can’t be overstated,” said Medgene CEO Mark Luecke. “We’ve been working on getting the power of Platform technology into the hands of pork industry veterinarians for seven years. Our license means we can bring the safety, speed and value of Platform Vaccine technology to work for the good of many.”
So, how soon can this platform supply a vaccine solution?
“Part of our program is a surveillance program to understand what’s circulating,” Smythe says. But once we identify that, we will compare that to the constructs we have in a library in Brookings, S.D. When we formulate a vaccine, if we have antigen already made it can be ready in just a matter of a few weeks, we can move pretty quick.”
Smythe says one of their key differentiators is their speed to come to a solution.
“We’ve got formulations that are designed to be kind of general formulations that usually work. And then with surveillance, we would tighten up those formulations with more of a custom formulation based upon the actual sequences that we identify within that population,” Smythe says.
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