IBBR, Sanaria to receive Phase II SBIR grant from NIAID for malaria vaccine

Sanaria Inc., a privately held company in Rockville, Maryland, and the Institute for Bioscience and Biotechnology Research (IBBR) of the University of Maryland College Park announce the receipt of a multi-year Phase II Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Grant from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The grant, worth nearly $3 million over a 3 year period, will fund research and development to genetically engineer mosquitoes that produce large numbers of parasites for Sanaria's malaria vaccine manufacturing process.  This Phase II SBIR award allows the continuation and expansion of a successful partnership supported by a Phase I SBIR. Malaria vaccine development is a major humanitarian objective. Malaria causes more than 200 million clinical cases and between 650,000 and 1.2 million deaths each year.

Dr. Peter F. Billingsley, Sanaria Senior Scientist and Principal Investigator on the grant states, "Sanaria and IBBR have established a powerful system with which to exploit new techniques in mosquito genetics and efficiently test the ability of modified mosquito strains to sustain high level P. falciparum infections." According to Dr. David O'Brochta, a Principal Investigator on the grant and Director of the Insect Transformation Facility at IBBR, "The partnership between Sanaria and IBBR supported by this grant is an extraordinary opportunity to continue to exploit the unique capabilities of our Insect Transformation Facility in pursuit of a goal of tremendous importance."

Stephen L. Hoffman, M.D., CEO of Sanaria Inc., notes, "The SBIR grants are critical to the success of our malaria vaccine development efforts, which are aimed at producing a vaccine that can be used to eliminate malaria from defined geographic areas.  This ongoing collaboration with IBBR provides an excellent opportunity to exploit state-of-the-art mosquito transformation methodologies to further our goal of generating extraordinarily high numbers of malaria parasites in mosquitoes to facilitate lower cost vaccine production."