Big DNA SMART award for phage-based vaccine
Edinburgh based firm Big DNA Ltd, which is developing new methods of delivering vaccines, has been awarded a SMART award of £70,000. SMART Scotland gives grants to small and medium sized enterprises to help support R&D projects representing a significant technological advance for UK industry or a sector.
The new award to Big DNA, which recently appointed of ex-cabinet minister Lord Freeman as its chairman, will be used to develop its phage-based vaccine technology over the next 18 months.
Dr John March, CEO Big DNA Ltd, said: “We are delighted to have been awarded this grant which will enable us to develop a Quality Assurance Scheme for manufacturing our phage vaccines, which are simpler and cheaper than traditional methods. This could be of enormous benefit in treating, for example, future strains of pandemic flu viruses, which will need fast effective systems to create new vaccines. What we are working on here in Edinburgh has the potential to save millions of lives in the future.”
Big DNA has developed the technology to make vaccines very quickly, in weeks rather than months, which can be administered orally, negating the need for needles.
“By using bacterial viruses (“phage”) to deliver DNA vaccinations,” John continued, “BigDNA aims to speed up the process of producing vaccines, reducing the costs of production, and importantly allowing vaccinations in all species to be delivered without the use of needles. Traditionally, vaccinations against viral diseases were impossible to deliver without the use of a needle. With our novel technology we have made serious progress in the fight against infectious diseases.”
Bacterial phages are becoming one of the key nano tools in a wide spread of applications from semiconductors to food. Combinatorial phage-display libraries can be used to evolve peptides that bind to a range of semiconductor surfaces with high specificity, depending on the crystallographic orientation and composition of the structurally similar materials and find use for the controlled placement and assembly of a variety of practically important materials, thus broadening the scope for 'bottom-up' electronic fabrication approaches, while the US Food and Drug Administration has approved bacteriophages for use as a food additive to get rid the Listeria monocytogenes bacterium.
Source: http://www.bigdna.com/
Resource: http://www.phages.org/