Imophoron

Imophoron is a vaccine development company that is using an innovative nanoparticle platform called ADDomer™ to tackle infectious diseases.

The ADDomer™ is a type of protein, discovered in 2015, that is easy to produce and engineer. ADDomers™ display the protein surface so that it resembles a pathogen. This protein could then be used to vaccinate individuals. ADDomer™-based vaccines are predicted to have low manufacturing costs, cause strong immune responses, and are stable at higher temperatures, requiring no refrigeration, unlike other vaccines.

The company was co-founded by Imre Berger, Professor of Biochemistry at the University of Bristol, and Mr Frédéric Garzoni. Garzoni was supported by a BBSRC Flexible Talent Mobility Account award, through BrisSynBio, to establish the company in Bristol in 2017. In 2020, the ADDomer™ platform was thrust into the spotlight as the world battled with COVID-19, highlighting the need for new technologies to allow rapid development and dissemination of vaccines. Using ADDomer™, Mr Garzoni was able to build a potential new vaccine for COVID-19 in only five weeks.

Impressively, each ADDomer™ protein’s surface can be engineered to target to a single pathogen, multiple pathogen variants, or even multiple different pathogens. This makes it applicable for ‘combo’ vaccines to protect against multiple diseases. For COVID-19, ADDomer™-based vaccines may be able to provide protection from different variants of the virus with just one vaccination.

Alongside COVID-19, the ADDomer™ platform has been used to develop vaccines for the treatment of:

• Infectious diseases such as respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), which causes cold-like symptoms but can induce severe breathing difficulties in infants, and Chikungunya, an infection spread by mosquitos which results in fever and joint pain
• Cancers, such as melanoma, where an ADDomer™-based vaccine has been shown to increase survival in an animal model  
• Animal diseases, such as Foot and Mouth, where ADDomer™-based vaccines have been shown to have the potential to protect against multiple diseases from a single vaccination

Working alongside a University of Bristol PhD student in Professor Berger’s lab, the RSV vaccine has recently successfully demonstrated the ability to generate a strong immune response against the key protein target.