GenVec’s fortunes may link to foot and mouth vaccine

First patients to get biopharma’s therapies could be bovine

GenVec’s foot and mouth disease (FMD) vaccine for livestock is a ‘‘short term product” that could be on the market in 18-30 months, said Douglas J. Swirsky, CFO.

The company anticipates a $300 million to $500 million-a-year market and has been contacted by veterinarian companies as potential partners, said Swirsky.

A United States Department of Agriculture report in 2003 revealed that an outbreak of foot and mouth disease in the United Kingdom in 2001 cost the British economy between $3.6 and $11.6 billion and necessitated the slaughter of about 4 million animals.

The Department of Homeland Security, concerned that foot and mouth disease could threaten food supplies — by bioterrorism or by accident — signed a new three-year, potential $15 million contract with GenVec in February to support the development and manufacture of the vaccine. Basically, the company uses another, harmless virus to vector or transport a piece of the FMD virus into an animal’s bloodstream to raise an immune response.

The vaccine would be the first molecular-based foot and mouth disease vaccine for cattle produced in the United States.

FMD is a highly contagious disease affecting cattle, swine, sheep, goats and deer. The cause is a virus that spreads through the air, but rarely transmitted to humans.

The GenVec vaccine, in cooperation with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, has already protected cattle and swine from the devastating disease in experiments at an off shore federal laboratory.

‘‘This signals tremendous promise,” USDA administrator Edward B. Knipling said in a statement. ‘‘... it has made significant developmental progress, and we are optimistic about its prospects.”

Robert R. Peters, professor of animal sciences at the University of Maryland, said the vaccine is ‘‘a step in the right direction.” He said, ‘‘since the foot and mouth disease [in the UK] and the mad cow disease outbreaks, there has been more education available to make producers more aware of bio-security to help prevent disasters like what happened in the UK.”

Swirsky said commercializing the foot and mouth vaccine would not necessarily get GenVec’s fledgling vaccine program off experimental ground, or to validate its human vaccine work. ‘‘I anticipate we will make a lot more progress on our vaccines by then, especially at NIH in the HIV trials,” he said. GenVec‘s experimental HIV vaccine is funded through the National Institutes of Health. It is also developing its malaria and influenza vaccines.

Currently, there is no foot and mouth disease vaccine that can be used in advance of an outbreak according to the U. S. Department of Agriculture. GenVec’s vaccine ‘‘will change the market dynamics,” predicts Swirsky.

The disease has not surfaced in the United States since 1929.

Virologist Marvin Grubman of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Agriculture Research Service and colleagues developed the method using their own adenoviruses in 1999. Agriculture Research Service partnered with GenVec for its patented adenovirus technology to produce the vaccine commercially after Grubman met with company officials in 2001.

The adenovector vaccine would also be a diagnostic in that it introduces a genetic marker into vaccinated animals. The marker would be useful to epidemiologists and livestock farmers because some animals do not show any symptoms of FMD immediately. Tests by USDA’s Agricultural Research Service at the Plum Island Animal Disease Center [on an island off New York] showed that when vaccinated cattle is then inoculated with the disease, it did not spread to other nearby cattle, as is common with foot and mouth disease.

Scientists worldwide have been trying to develop an improved FMD vaccine for the past 30 years, said Grubman, who added, ‘‘I think ours is furthest along.”

A vaccine currently is made with a killed virus vaccine that virtually eliminated the disease in Europe by the 1990s, but does not have the protective or diagnostic advantages of the GenVec⁄ARS vaccine, according to GenVec and ARS officials.

This report originally appeared in The Business Gazette.