Building on Natural Immune Responses
and Enabling Equitable Vaccine Access
EVA Therapeutics Technology and Assets
EVA Therapeutics (EVA Tx) aims to become a global leader in computational vaccine design for LMIC-focused diseases, 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 trigglers for protective immunity, starting from the whole pathogen genome.
EVA (an acronym for Equitable Vaccine Access) Therapeutics will build a pipeline of affordable, scalable vaccine candidates ready for downstream partners to manufacture and distribute in LMIC markets.
Currently, EVA Tx has established an MOU with EpiVax, Inc. to access its computational vaccine design technology and vaccine assets. By assets, we mean vaccine designs that have already established proof of concept in preclinical studies. In addition, EVA Tx can perform vaccine design for entities that are developing vaccines for LMIC.
Several of these technolgies are listed on this page, others will be updated as they become availabe. Interested parties should send an email to Hello [at] EVA-Therapeutics.com.
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 Unversity 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 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]. This technology is available to EVA Tx under our MOU with EpiVax, Inc.
JANUSMATRIX
In silico removal of inhibitory antigens
The JanusMatrix algorithm, included in the Ancer platform, is a key differentiator of our 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.
