이 기사는 2020년 04월 14일 08:00 thebell 에 표출된 기사입니다.

South Korea’s bio-venture company GI Innovation has announced a partnership with the International Vaccine Institute (IVI) to develop vaccines against COVID-19 and influenza viruses.

GI Innovation said on April 9 that it has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with the IVI to jointly research vaccines against COVID-19 and influenza viruses. In this new move, GI Innovation will provide IVI with its pandemic vaccine adjuvant platform technology to accelerate the development of an effective vaccine against COVID-19. Headquartered in Seoul, IVI is a nonprofit inter-governmental organization established in 1997 under an initiative from the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).

The bio-venture company will provide IVI with vaccine adjuvants candidates to examine the magnitude of immune responses to vaccines against COVID-19 and influenza viruses. Adjuvants are essential to the induction of proper preventive immunity, especially against poorly immunogenic antigens or when only a small amount of antigen is present.

One issue with the use of adjuvants is potential toxicity which can cause adverse side effects. As vaccines are widely used to prevent infection in otherwise healthy persons, safety is paramount. The safety of GI Innovation’s adjuvant platform has been examined and confirmed through various preclinical toxicity studies. For further confirmation, a human clinical study is scheduled for the second half of this year.

The research collaboration between GI Innovation and IVI is expected to shed further light on how to improve the efficacy of numerous vaccines under development.

IVI Director General Jerome Kim said, “This partnership between IVI and GI Innovation is expected to allow two parties to accelerate the development of adjuvants that can be applied for vaccines against COVID-19 and other emerging viruses, as well as influenza.”

“We are confident in the core value of our adjuvant platform,” GI Innovation’s Founder Myoung Ho Jang said, adding, “It has broad applications in the development of promising vaccines to rapidly respond to epidemics like COVID-19, which has been devastating to the entire global community”.

(By reporter Choi Eun-soo)