ST. PAUL, Minnesota–Syntiron LLC, a biotech start-up, has signed a $149 million licensing deal with Sanofi Pasteur in Lyon, France to develop a vaccine against so-called “super bugs,” bacteria that have become resistant to antibiotics.
Under the agreement, Syntiron and Sanofi Pasteur, the world’s largest vaccine maker, will jointly create a vaccine to combat Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), which causes deadly staph infections in hospitals and other health care settings.
The goal is to start selling the vaccine in the United States and Europe in three years, Syntiron CEO Joe Shaw told MedCity News. Sanofi will pay Syntiron an upfront fee, research capital and several milestone regulatory and commercial payments that could reach $149 million. The French giant will discuss the deal with reporters at its research and development conference Thursday.
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The deal is a major coup for Syntiron, which spun off of Epitopix (itself a spin-off of the Willmar Poultry Company) in 2004 to commercialize a vaccine technology that blocks the ability of pathogens to absorb iron from the host. Last year, Syntiron won $3.8 million from the U.S. Defense Department to develop vaccines against biological weapons of mass destruction like anthrax and bubonic plague.
The Sanofi deal “is a major validation of [Syntiron] and its technology,” said Shaw, a former top executive at Johnson & Johnson and veteran CEO of several biotech start-ups. “This will hopefully attract attention from investors [for other applications] and from other companies that make vaccines.”
MRSA, which causes a type of skin infection, has been the scourge of health institutions around the world. The proportion of S. aureus isolates resistant to antibiotics causing infections in hospitalized U.S. patients jumped from 2 percent in 1974 to about 40 percent in 1997, according to the Centers for Disease Control.
A major study published two years ago in the Journal of the American Medical Association estimated there were 94,360 invasive MRSA infections in the U.S. alone in 2005, which played a role in the deaths of 18,650 cases. The study reported a standardized incident rate of 31.8 per 100,000 patients. By comparison, the incident rate for other pathogens that year, such as ones that cause pneumonia and flu, ranged from 14 per 100,000 to 1 per 100,000, a low rate the study credits to vaccination programs.
Even more worrisome, infections are spreading to patients outside of hospitals.
MRSA ” is a major public health problem primarily related to health care but no longer confined to intensive care units, acute care hospitals, or any health care institution,” the study concludes.
Several research institutions and drug firms have been trying to develop a vaccine. Merck & Co. has been testing an experimental vaccine administered to patients undergoing open heart surgery. This past summer, Astrogenix, based in Houston, used the Space Shuttle Discovery to test the behavior of MRSA in microgravity. The company hopes to identify a weaker strain of the bacteria that can be used in a vaccine.
But Shaw says Sytiron’s core technology, called siderophore receptor and porin (SRP) vaccines, has been thoroughly vetted in animals. SRP targets protein receptors that allow pathogens to steal iron from the host, effectively starving them to death before they cause infection.
Dr. Daryll Emery and Darren Straub, two microbiologists at Willmar Poultry, developed the SRP vaccine in the early 1990s, to protect turkeys from salmonella. Nearly a decade later, Willmar Poultry founded Epitopix to commercialize SRP, which has since been administered to more than 100 million animals.
In March, the United States Department of Agriculture granted Epitopix the country’s first conditional license to sell a vaccine that combats a deadly strain of E. coli bacteria in cattle.
The technology’s success with “animals gave Sanofi the confidence it would work” in humans, Shaw said. He noted the French giant, which generated $4.1 billion in sales last year, initially didn’t plan to disclose the licensing agreement. But after several promising tests of the vaccine in animals, Sanofi decided to announce the deal at its science conference Thursday, he said.
“This agreement with Syntiron is just another example of Sanofi Pasteur’s interest in partnering with biotechs to produce innovative vaccines to address public health needs,” Sanofi president and CEO Wayne Pisano said in a statement. “Along with our development of a vaccine to prevent Clostridium difficile infection, the successful development of a vaccine to prevent MRSA would be a major achievement in combating hospital-associated infections.”
