Alvea, a startup biotechnology company, announced that it will begin to develop, test, and deliver DNA vaccines at scale to low and middle income countries with limited access to existing vaccine options.
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Alvea is a team of physicians, scientists, and logistics experts, collaborating to develop scalable, affordable, shelf-stable SARS-CoV-2 DNA vaccines; reduce vaccine inequity; and mitigate the risk of future global health threats. Alvea is building a DNA vaccine platform with a specific focus on medical resource-limited settings to complement current efforts and achieve truly global distribution. Alvea’s platform is designed for massive scale-up of manufacturing and deployment using existing technologies and facilities around the world, all while being at least as fast to develop and as programmable as mRNA platform vaccines. As a testament to its capacity for speed, today Alvea is announcing that it has begun animal studies for a new vaccine candidate tailored to BA.2. It’s the first announced BA.2-specific vaccine to enter animal testing anywhere, just weeks after the variant was first recognized as one with the potential to quickly spread worldwide.
Similar to mRNA vaccines, DNA vaccines cause a patient’s cells to produce an antigen protein: DNA instructs patient cells to produce an antigen-coding mRNA (the same mRNA sequence leading vaccine brands are manufacturing). Unlike mRNA vaccines, DNA vaccines are stable at room temperature, making them easier to store and transport than mRNA vaccines. This makes them a far more viable solution for distributing and rapidly immunizing populations than mRNA alternatives, which, by virtue of their inherent fragility, have proven difficult to deliver to remote parts of the globe.
“What matters above all else is the time it takes to vaccinate the people most in need. Omicron/SARS-CoV-2 and future variants are a global problem and so long as a part of the world is left to wait, the suffering of this pandemic will continue and new variants will emerge”, said Ethan Alley, co-CEO of Alvea. “We are working day and night to develop Alveavax as fast and safely as humanly possible. We’re aiming to have our platform be an option in the pandemic preparedness toolkit of countries that have not seen many doses.”