Martinsried-based Leukocare AG and Malvern Panalytical Ltd intend to combine their expertise in vaccine formulation and stabilisation to improve the availability of vaccines against COVID-19.
The two companies intend to combine Leukocare's expertise in biopharmaceutical formulation development with Malvern Panalytical's analytical know-how. The aim is to understand how the stability of vaccines can be improved to ultimately increase production and simplify distribution.
Dr. Andreas Seidl, Chief Operating Officer at Leukocare, commented: "I am excited and thankful to begin this collaboration at this unprecedented time. While we have already seen tremendous efforts and several successes on approvals of vaccines targeting the COVID-19 pandemic in the past few months, there is still a high unmet need for improved stability, supply and storage conditions to serve the vast majority of people and countries over the upcoming months and years. Our collaboration with Malvern Panalytical will help us to work even better on our ongoing and future projects to achieve stability improvements for a range of vaccines.”
Mark Fleiner, President of Malvern Panalytical, said, "We have all experienced the impact of the current COVID-19 pandemic on the lives of our families, friends and work colleagues. The availability of vaccines brings us all hope - so we jumped at the opportunity to be involved in this deep collaboration with Leukocare working together to understand how vaccine stability can be improved and ensure wider availability."
In addition to other projects, Leukocare is developing a novel adenoviral vector-based vaccine against COVID-19 with its partners Univercells (Belgium) and ReiThera (Italy) with Leukocare contributing to the drug development process with a liquid vaccine formulation.