Building on Natural Immune Responses
and Enabling Equitable Vaccine Access
Vaccine Design for LMIC
EVA Therapeutics (EVA Tx) aims to become a global leader in computational vaccine design for LMIC-focused diseases, including cancers by accelerating solutions for neglected pathogens and supporting equitable vaccine access worldwide.
We use advanced computational immunology tools (also known as AI) to identify the most effective and safest natural triggers for protective immunity, starting from the whole pathogen and/or cancer genomes.
EVA (an acronym for Equitable Vaccine Access) Therapeutics is ready to collaborate on and lead the design of affordable, scalable vaccine candidates ready for downstream partners to manufacture and distribute in LMIC markets. EVA Tx can collaborate on vaccine design for entities developing vaccines for LMIC.
Through licenses with EpiVax, Inc. EVA Tx will use computational vaccine design technology and vaccine assets (vaccine designs that have already established proof of concept in preclinical studies).
Several of these technologies are listed on this page, others will be updated as they become available. Interested parties should contact us.
Epitope-driven Vaccines
Initially called computational vaccinology, this approach to developing vaccines for cancer and infectious diseases was pioneered by Dr. Jay Berzofsky at the National Institute of Health. Founder Annie De Groot was a post-doc in the Berzofsky lab at the National Cancer Institute before establishing her own tools while faculty at Brown University and University of Rhode Island. With NIH funding from a U01, she and EpiVax CIO Bill Martin and IT Director Matt Ardito developed the iVAX toolkit website.
See: De Groot AS, et al. (2020) Better Epitope Discovery, Precision Immune Engineering, and Accelerated Vaccine Design Using Immunoinformatics Tools. Front. Immunol. 11:442. doi: 10.3389/fimmu.2020.00442
ANCER
The "Answer" To Cancer
Ancer is an end-to-end, automated neoantigen identification and personalized cancer vaccine design platform [1]. A technology that was developed by EpiVax, Inc under then-CEO/CSO Annie De Groot MD, designed by EpiVax CTO Guilhem Richard, Ancer leverages the EpiMatrix and JanusMatrix algorithms, state-of-the-art tools that have been externally validated in several prospective vaccine studies and that are broadly utilized worldwide by pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies [3,4].
EVA Tx has an exclusive license with EpiVax, Inc. for use of the technology.
JANUSMATRIX
In silico removal of inhibitory antigens
The JanusMatrix algorithm, included in the Ancer platform, is a key differentiator of the technology. JanusMatrix, named after Janus — the Roman god of duality, is used to identify putative epitopes which have the potential to cross-react with the human genome [4].
In the case of vaccines, cross conservation between human epitopes and the antigenic epitopes may indicate that such a candidate utilizes immune camouflage, thereby evading the immune response and making for an ineffective vaccine.
