Is it a coincidence that every time Dendreon gets positive news, some vaccine developers have good results on their preventive or therapeutic vaccines to announce? Today, it is NOVAVAX (NVAX), which announced that very low doses of its pandemic influenza vaccine provided protection against a lethal challenge of live H5N1 viruses, according to preclinical data presented at the Second International Conference on Avian Influenza in Humans.

Two 0.6 microgram doses of Novavax’s virus-like particle (VLP) H5N1 vaccine — without the addition of an adjuvant — protected ferrets from challenges with live H5N1 bird flu viruses. This dose is 25-fold lower than the average human dose for most seasonal flu vaccines and more than 100 times lower than other H5N1 vaccines against avian influenza. Novavax plans to submit an investigational new drug application to the FDA in mid-2007 to commence human clinical trials with the novel H5N1 influenza vaccine.

VLPs mimic the three-dimensional structure of a virus but do not contain genetic material, so they cannot replicate or cause infection. As VLPs maintain functional properties of both influenza surface proteins (hemagglutinin and neuraminidase), they have been shown to activate multiple arms of the immune system to generate a broadly protective immune response.
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