NIDA grants Selecta Biosciences $3M to develop nicotine vaccine for smoking cessation and relapse prevention

Aug 16 2010

Selecta Biosciences, Inc., a biopharmaceutical company developing synthetic nanoparticle vaccines and immunotherapies, today announced that it has been awarded a grant for $3 million from the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), an institute within the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH). The grant is aimed at advancing the development of an enhanced therapeutic nicotine vaccine for the treatment of smoking cessation and relapse prevention.

“We are delighted that NIDA has recognized the uniqueness and potential advantages of Selecta's synthetic therapeutic vaccines and has elected to support Selecta's tSVP nicotine vaccine, in a very competitive process, to address the enormous unmet medical need of smoking cessation”

The $3 million grant will support the funding of a clinical drug candidate from Selecta's pipeline, and assist with advancing a nicotine vaccine from preclinical through early clinical evaluation. The award is one of a select number of grants provided nationwide by NIH under the unique BRDG-SPAN program (Biomedical Research and Development and Growth To Spur the Acceleration of New Technologies Pilot Program) which is designed to bridge the gap between R&D and commercialization for promising new medical technologies.

"We are delighted that NIDA has recognized the uniqueness and potential advantages of Selecta's synthetic therapeutic vaccines and has elected to support Selecta's tSVP nicotine vaccine, in a very competitive process, to address the enormous unmet medical need of smoking cessation," said Werner Cautreels, Ph.D., Chief Executive Officer of Selecta Biosciences. "We view a nicotine vaccine as one of our promising programs that are poised to advance into human clinical trials based on our progress with Selecta's technology platform."

Selecta's tSVP technology offers in this case a new approach to a nicotine vaccine designed to boost immune responses, or more specifically nicotine antibody titers, beyond previous technologies. Selecta's tSVP immunomodulatory nanoparticles aim to induce highly predictable immune responses, for durable effect in smoking cessation. Although previous research has shown the therapeutic potential for vaccinating against nicotine by inducing nicotine-specific antibodies, published studies with differently designed vaccines show that only a small fraction of study patients achieved anti-nicotine titers sufficient to increase smoking cessation above placebo.

SOURCE Selecta Biosciences