University of Florida

Why we entered the Competition

We entered the prize competition to apply innovative technologies for vaccine design developed by members of the research group to vaccines against brucella mellitensis. 

The project team

Roy Curtiss and his research group have published 400 manuscripts, have 51 families of filed and issued patents with 43 issued and 12 pending US patents (with 6 filed in 2018) and 4 APHIS licensed vaccines with three currently being marketed. Dr. Curtiss’s holds a fellowship in the American Academy for Microbiology and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Inventors. He recently received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Society for Microbiology. 

David Pascual, Professor of Mucosal Immunology at the University of Florida, has made seminal contributions to the study of Brucella pathogenesis and in the construction of improved live vaccines to prevent Brucella infections. He is a Fellow of the American Academy for Microbiology. Wei Sun, Associate Professor of Microbiology and Immunology at Albany Medical College, has made seminal contributions to understanding pathogenesis of Yersinia pestis and has constructed safe efficacious vaccines that protect against all Yersinia species infecting mammals and humans. 

Stephen Trent, UGA Distinguished Professor at the University of Georgia, is an internationally recognized expert on cell surface chemistry and biosynthesis of bacterial cell wall components. He is a Fellow of the American Academy for Microbiology.

Our technical approach

Since Brucella, like almost all successful pathogens, have evolved multiple means to suppress, modulate or circumvent induction of immunity, and likely synthesize subterfuge antigens to elicit non-protective antibody responses. Within this competition our approach is to first eliminate as many means as possible by which Brucella suppresses, modulates and/or circumvents induction of protective immunity and then introduce mutations to confer regulated delayed attenuation and regulated delayed lysis in vivo. Such a PIEBV construct should predictably be safe and highly efficacious in preventing infection and abortion caused by Brucella.

Additional information

We are interested in collaborating on the ongoing development and future registration and commercialisation of our vaccine

For further information please contact David Pascual [email protected] or John Byatt, Associate Director, Office of Technology Licensing [email protected]