Business Day (Johannesburg)
Tamar Kahn
11 July 2002
Johannesburg — The University of Cape Town (UCT) has entered into an agreement with the Nasdaq-listed Large Scale Biology Corporation to develop and manufacture vaccines against HIV and human papillomavirus (HPV), which causes cervical cancer.
Although the agreement will boost UCT's efforts to find an effective vaccine against HIV-1 subtype C, the subtype most prevalent in southern Africa, it is likely to be several years before such a vaccine is commercially viable. There are several HIV vaccine research initiatives now under way in SA, co-ordinated by the SA AIDS Vaccine Initiative at the Medical Research Council.
Research teams at UCT and the University of Stellenbosch hope to develop novel HIV vaccines based on local strains of the virus.
The agreement between UCT and its US partner builds on research collaboration initiated in 1999 by Prof Ed Rybicki, a member of the Institute for Infectious Disease and Molecular Medicine at UCT
It grants UCT a licence to use Large Scale Biology's technology to continue development on its most promising candidate vaccines, so that they can be manufactured for clinical trials.
Under the terms of the agreement, UCT will have the African rights for the commercialisation of any successful vaccines, and the company will have the rights in North America and Europe. The collaborators will share the commercialisation rights elsewhere in the world.
The agreement also allows the two parties to pursue joint funding for the vaccine development initiatives.
"We are very excited about this collaboration, because it brings appropriate technology to SA to enable the development of cost effective vaccines for Africa," said Rybicki.
The director of the project, Prof Anne Lise-Williamson said that cervical cancer screening and treatment programmes are inadequate in the developing world, so an HPV vaccine would have greatest impact for women in poor countries.
Robert L Erwin, chairman of Large Scale Biology, described the project as "one of the most important global women's health initiatives", and said that there were more than 600 deaths daily from cervical cancer, all associated with HPV.
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