Pfizer Animal Health has licensed a Halifax firm’s vaccine-boosting platform to develop new livestock treatments.
Terms of Pfizer’s deal with ImmunoVaccine Technologies, announced Monday, weren’t disclosed, but the Halifax company will get signing fees and milestone and royalty payments as Pfizer begins to commercialize its VacciMax platform.
The licensing deal allows Pfizer to use the platform toward future, specific livestock vaccine products.
VacciMax delivers longer-lasting immunity in a single shot, with no booster shots needed nor any “significant side effects” noted, ImmunoVaccine said in a release. The company is now looking for partners to develop veterinary vaccines both for disease treatment and for fertility control.
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The company’s goal in both the animal and human health markets, it said, is to improve existing vaccines and develop new ones based on the platform’s ability to generate improved immune response to substances once seen as “poor” antigens. It said its platform not only improves response to vaccines in the bloodstream but also at the “cell-mediated” level (where T-cells directly attack harmful cells such as viruses, bacteria or fungi).
The firm said its technology may also help in developing human-health vaccines both as preventives against disease and as therapeutics against certain cancers.
