Frontier IP Group Plc’s (LON:FIPP) portfolio company, The Vaccine Group (TVG), has been awarded a £50,000 grant to develop a vaccine to combat mastitis in cows.
The AIM-listed investment firm, which specialises in commercialising university technology, said the grant, awarded by the Bacterial Vaccine Network (BVN), would be used by TVG to run a proof-of-concept study to investigate whether its novel platform technology can produce a safe-to-use vaccine that is cheaper and more effective than the vaccines currently available to farmers.
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The vaccine itself will target the E.coli bacterium, one of the main causes of mastitis, a potentially fatal condition that causes inflammation in the udders of cows, as well as having potential uses against other diseases such as Ebola, SARS, swine and bird flu, and Marburg viruses.
Frontier added that the vaccine, if successfully developed, would remove the need for farmers to use antibiotics and cut the risk of the bacteria developing antibiotic resistance.
The technology is currently being developed by a team at the University of Plymouth’s School of Biomedical Sciences led by Dr Michael Jarvis, Associate Professor of Virology and Immunology, in collaboration with Professor Alain Vanderplasschen of the Department of Infectious and Parasitic Diseases at the University of Liège in Belgium.
Neil Crabb, chief executive of Frontier IP, said the award provided “strong validation” of the technology being developed by TVG.