According to the World Health Organization, the seasonal influenza costs over $70 billion a year to the US economy, due to healthcare costs and lost productivity. Despite production of approximately 300 million influenza vaccine doses globally, seasonal influenza continues to infect 5-15% of the population every year and cause approximately 500,000 deaths.

While influenza vaccines have been available and used for more than 60 years, there has been little improvement in the way the vaccine is produced. Today, vaccine production remains a slow and expensive process, mainly because the production of the influenza vaccine is egg-based. The long lead time for production often results in an ineffective vaccine strain being manufactured because the strain has to be deduced before it is actually known.

LG811 (seasonal) is a virus-like particle (VLP) vaccine. It is produced from cells lines that have been generated using Lentigen’s Lentiviral vector technology. This core protein and antigen complex resembles a live virus to the immune system. Its ability to elicit a powerful immune response has been demonstrated in mice.

Mice immunized with LG611 show potent antibody immune response. Serum from immunized mice was serially diluted. A HA antibody response could be detected even after a 10,000 fold dilution. Lack of a further response with adjuvant indicates that the response was not a subunit, but due to VLP particles.

Lentigen’s VLP-based influenza vaccine has several advantages over current influenza vaccines, including:

• High copy numbers that lead to robust production yields
• Elimination of dependency on chicken eggs to manufacture vaccines
• Significant reduction of the time to manufacture permitting decisions about which flu strain to use to be made later in the flu season
• Exact strain matched vaccine because the VLPs are generated from a single round of replication, rather than an infection process
• Rapidly scalable manufacturing process
• Reduction of the potential for adverse events resulting from glycosylation disparity, since LG811 are produced from human cells

LG811 is currently in preclinical development. Following demonstration of immunogenicity and efficacy in animal models, GMP production, animal toxicity testing and clinical trials will be initiated.