Vivaldi Biosciences Inc. is developing genetically engineered vaccines with the potential for increased effectiveness in the prevention of common seasonal influenza (“flu”) and emergent pandemic flu. The company’s proprietary technologies provide an advanced and highly differentiated approach to development and production of vaccines. Vivaldi is developing live attenuated influenza vaccines (LAIVs) by altering the gene for nonstructural protein 1 (NS1), a virulence factor of the influenza virus. The company’s initial focus is the development of a more effective seasonal flu vaccine addressing the unmet needs of adults age 50 and older. Conventional inactivated vaccines for seasonal flu work best in young adults; their effectiveness is reduced by as much as 50% in the elderly. The over-fifty population is the largest market segment in developed countries and has the greatest need for an improved vaccine for seasonal flu.
Vivaldi’s intellectual property includes over twenty-five issued patents, with broad freedom to operate and exclusive rights to use reverse genetics and plasmid rescue technologies to develop and produce virus strains with modifications of NS1. Vivaldi has co-exclusivity on virus compositions with fully-deleted NS1. Vivaldi’s proprietary technologies also are applicable to vaccines for other serious human respiratory diseases caused by negative-strand RNA viruses such as respiratory syncytial virus and parainfluenza, cell-based vaccine production, and drug discovery targeting NS1.
Vivaldi was co-founded by Dr. Elliott Kieff of Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School, and Drs. Peter Palese and Adolfo García-Sastre at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine. The company is privately-held.
Copyright 2011, Vivaldi Biosciences Inc._ All rights reserved.
