Gylden’s T cell-priming vaccine candidates are advantageous in numerous ways:
- Potentially reduce clinical to subclinical disease by priming a T cell-mediated immune response.
- They are 100% synthetic and do not contain any RNA or DNA – do not use inactivated or live-attenuated pathogens – and therefore should be inherently safer to develop and use.
- They replicate the cellular immune responses to highly conserved recognition elements of the pathogen often present in internal proteins for which selective pressure for mutation is minimal. An advantage of this approach is that these internal components are conserved within viral strains of the same family, making a universal product candidate to tackle highly mutagenic viruses such as seasonal influenza possible.
- As well as being less susceptible to mutational escape than antibody responses induced by traditional vaccines, the T cell responses induced by Gylden’s candidates may be more durable and avoid allergic, autoimmune or antibody-mediated side effects.
- They are designed to be delivered by novel intradermal microneedle technologies, which means that there is less need for primary health care providers to administer and for travel to central health clinics, hence improving compliance – a major challenge to providing vaccination in developing settings. Future planned dry patches are stable at room temperature avoiding the need for refrigeration, which enables easy transportation to remote parts of the world where they are needed most.
