GeoVax Labs to present at Vaccines R&D Conference

GeoVax Labs announced that its Chief Scientific Officer, Farshad Guirakhoo, PhD, will be a featured speaker at the Vaccines Research and Development conference, being held November 18-20, 2019 in Boston, Massachusetts. Dr. Guirakhoo will co-chair a session on infectious diseases, during which he will deliver a presentation entitled, MVA as a Safe and Effective Platform for Delivery of Multi-Antigen Vaccine Candidates for Infectious Diseases and Cancer. During the conference, Dr. Guirakhoo will also serve as a panelist for a session discussing the development of vaccines for the current Ebola crisis. GeoVax's Modified Vaccinia Ankara platform technology is built on a 5th generation MVA vector system that is improved for high expression and stable transgenes during manufacture. Similar to its parent MVA, it has the advantages of being a live replication-competent vector in avian cells for manufacturing, yet replication-deficient in mammalian cells for vaccination, thus inherently safe. Importantly, MVA vaccines elicit protective T cell as well as antibody responses in animals and humans. The GeoVax MVA platform can be combined with the potent immunogenicity of Virus Like Particles or be used to express proteins in their native conformations, enabling construction of vaccine candidates that induce full protection after a single dose. Built upon this platform, GeoVax's preventive HIV vaccine has demonstrated robust and durable immune responses in clinical trials involving more than 500 subjects. Single-dose protection is a favourable characteristic of a vaccine for emerging infectious disease outbreak response, given the speed of spread of pathogens and the impracticality of multi-dose regimens in the under-resourced settings where outbreaks often occur. MVA-VLP vaccine candidates against various virus families induced strong antibody and T cell responses and demonstrated broad protections after single dose vaccinations against lethal challenges. In his presentation, Dr. Guirakhoo will discuss the utility of the platform not only against emerging and re-emerging pathogens but also against cancer or chronic infectious diseases such as HBV, HPV and malaria.