Competitive Advantages

The SAVINE technology has significant advantages over traditional whole gene or attenuation vaccine approaches as well as more recent epitope-based approaches. These advantages include:

• Enhanced Safety: Safety is improved because the biological functions of the selected proteins/genes are destroyed by the fragmentation and 'scrambling' of the protein sequences. In this way the entire sequences of key immunogenic, but potentially dangerous, proteins can now be included in a vaccine (e.g. cancer & HIV).
• Extended Population Coverage: SAVINE offers more complete population coverage than epitope-based approaches because all the potential T cell epitopes are incorporated under the SAVINE technology. In this way SAVINEs are more similar to whole pathogen-based approaches. Moreover, processing and presentation of pathogen epitopes to the immune system is often improved because a) the original structure of selected proteins is destroyed and b) the synthetic DNA utilizes optimised amino acid codons that often improve expression of the designed synthetic protein. Incorporation of maximal sequence information means that SAVINE therapies will have application in populations with diverse ethnic spreads. Additionally, the efficacy of cancer SAVINEs is less likely to be affected by the ability of cancers to escape immune control by down-regulating targeted antigens.
• Cost Effective Development: SAVINE therapies remove the need to isolate specific DNA, fully characterise pathogens or cancer antigens or identify epitope sequences. The relatively small number of components in SAVINEs while still encoding large amounts of immunological information means that SAVINEs will be cost effective to manufacture.