The Defense Health Agency (DHA)—an important component of the United States Military Health System—has selected Solaris Vaccines to create a safe and effective vaccine for preventing death and disease caused by the Dengue Virus. This award will enable Solaris to apply and optimize its proprietary high-throughput inactivation technology called VacciRAPTORTM to combat this global health threat.
Dengue is the fastest growing mosquito-transmitted disease in the world. The disease is caused by four serotypes of the Dengue virus: DEN-1, DEN-2, DEN-3, and DEN-4. Infection by one serotype offers no cross-protective immunity for infection by another serotype. In fact, subsequent heterologous infection can cause even more severe disease. A primary consequence of this unique etiology of the Dengue virus is that many of the traditional approaches for producing vaccines are not tenable. Creating a safe and cost-effective Dengue vaccine necessitates evaluating novel technologies to overcome the shortcomings of these other methods.
The VacciRAPTOR approach enables the generation of approximately 100,000 vaccine doses per hour using UV light in the presence of a photosensitizer to render the virus non-infectious, while retaining the viral antigens required to protect the recipients of the resulting vaccine product.
“Solaris Vaccines is delighted to have been selected to provide this critically needed capability to the US Department of Defense,” said Dr. Michael Artinger, CEO of Solaris. “Applying our VacciRAPTOR approach not only to Dengue, but to other pathogens posing significant risk to our military forces, is of paramount importance to Solaris.”
About Solaris Vaccines, Inc.
Solaris Vaccines, Inc. was formed 2021 to address many of the challenges of creating vaccines in response to emerging threats to global human health. Current methods of developing and manufacturing vaccines are slow, not fully protective, technically complex, use toxic chemicals, and often have onerous storage requirements. The Solaris SolaVAX™ method uses riboflavin (vitamin B2) and UV light to rapidly and effectively inactivate pathogens, resulting in a new approach for creating vaccines against pathogens such as viruses, bacteria and parasites. Go to solarisvax.com to learn more.