A Different Vaccine Approach
Traditional vaccines are reliant on a few primary approaches: empirically weakened Live Attenuated Virus (LAV), inactivated (killed) forms of the virus, or created from the pathogen’s individual protein components (subunit vaccines) through protein purification, recombinant technology methods, or a combination of both.
Vacunax takes a phylogenetic approach to identify key virus evolutionary elements that are target for recombinant modifications to produce a safe, host-range limited LAV (HR-LAV) vaccine. Vacunax identified phylogenetic information that codes for key structural elements of the transmembrane domain of arbovirus spike proteins which have evolved in length to span both the thinner invertebrate membrane, and thicker cholesterol containing vertebrate membranes. Removing specific amino acids from this transmembrane domain results in species restricted viruses which grow efficiently in insect cells, but produces very limited amounts of non-infectious (inactive) particles in vertebrate cells.