Revolutionising animal vaccines: ArkVax's affordable solution

Vaccines represent a highly cost-effective, efficacious intervention to control and prevent the spread of disease in humans and animals.

In animals, vaccination:

• enhances welfare and improves the productivity of treated animals to meet global food security
• ensures food safety and supports people’s livelihoods
• safeguards public health, including playing a key role in preventing or reducing the risk of spillover of zoonotic diseases and antimicrobial resistance to humans

As the health of livestock is intimately connected to the health of people, the development of veterinary vaccines is an important tool in a unified One Health approach to nutrition security.

ArkVax, a spin-out co-founded in 2020 by Professor Brendan Wren and Dr Jon Cuccui from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM), produces vaccines with a focus on livestock diseases. BBSRC funding has been key, supporting initial exploration through to commercialisation.

Professor Wren received his first BBSRC grant in 1995 for investigating the bacteria Campylobacter jejuni. By exploring the bacteria’s genes and proteins, he identified the production of proteins with sugar attachments, known as glycoproteins.

BBSRC Responsive Mode funding supported Professor Wren in transferring the ability to produce glycoproteins to another, more lab-appropriate bacteria. This opened the doors for a new method of glycoengineering called Protein Glycan Coupling Technology (PGCT), primarily used to produce glycoconjugate vaccines.

These vaccines are effective but expensive to make using traditional methods, so use in animals had previously been cost-prohibitive. The quicker and cheaper PGCT glycoconjugate vaccine production method opened this avenue.

The Wren group have been developing animal vaccines using PGCT since 2010 with support from BBSRC through sLoLa grants, Follow-on Funds, and Responsive Mode funding. Dr Cuccui received a BBSRC-funded Enterprise Fellowship in 2017 to build the business knowledge needed for a successful company. This, alongside support from Babraham Research Campus through its Accelerate@Babraham programme, was key to the development of ArkVax.