Stablepharma Ltd

What was the key scientific challenge in making this vaccine stable at room temperature without compromising performance?

Yeah, so Bruce Rosa, who's the scientific founder of Stable Pharma, who are the British SME who've manufactured SPVXO2, he's been working on this since the mid-1980s when he was a laboratory scientist in Cambridge working in immunology.

And to cut a long story short, they were looking for ways of stabilizing laboratory reagents and came across at a completely separate scientific meeting people who explained something which is known as the regeneration plant which was a plant found in the desert of the United States which basically dries out completely and looks dead in periods of drought and then comes back to life when the rains come.

And the scientific discovery had been made that a naturally occurring sugar called trehalose was the underpinning agent that let that plant do that.

Yeah, so the regulator, the EMA actually, had asked for a second comparator to be included as well, which is fair enough because Tetadiff itself is not actually approved in the EU at the moment.

Why these vaccines? I think the most basic answer is with any disruptive technology in a company coming along, it's quite hard to find a company who are willing to take a risk modifying an existing product that they're already selling in a global marketplace.

So the manufacturer of Tetadiff, who were also part of the output, they're on the author of the paper, Balbio, they were really fantastic because they agreed to work with Stable Pharma to make a temperature-free version of their product to be able to compete better in the global marketplace, DT Booster was chosen as the most similar of the alternative EU and EU licensed vaccines that we could choose.

So it was quite interesting, though, because that, of course, leads to interesting immunology scientific results when we analyze the paper.