Our Influenza Product Pipeline

VaxInnate is developing vaccines to respond to urgent public health needs. The company’s technology is broadly applicable for providing protection against and treatment for a wide range of diseases, including bacterial, viral, and parasitic infections. Current product development focuses on one of the most vexing and costly public health challenges – influenza.

Influenza is one of the most communicable diseases. The flu typically affects children and the elderly the hardest. Complications from flu cause more than 200,000 hospitalizations in the U.S. annually, and lead to approximately 36,000 deaths each year.

Novel influenza strains are widely generated in populations of domestic and wild fowl, pigs, humans and other animals. Most strains only infect animals. Of those that spread to humans, many are easily combated by a healthy person’s immune system. Occasionally, however, an entirely new strain emerges that spreads from animals to humans. Because humans lack any previous exposure to and thus protection from these novel viruses, these strains may cause a pandemic involving widespread, sometimes severe disease.

VaxInnate has a strong preclinical influenza pipeline, with programs targeting both seasonal and pandemic influenza:

• Flagellin.HuHA and flagellin.AvHA: fusion proteins linking flagellin with the most immunoprotective domain of viral hemagglutinin (HA) – the globular head – derived from human and avian influenza virus, respectively.
• Flagellin.HuM2e and flagellin.AvM2e: fusion proteins linking flagellin with the M2 ectodomain (M2e) of the influenza A virus and avian influenza virus, respectively. M2 is the influenza virus ion channel that helps the virus change its pH when it has entered a cell, a critical step in the infectious process. M2e is a conserved segment of M2 projecting above the surface of the viral particle.