mRNA-based Gonorrhea Vaccine Found Protective in Pre-Clinical Setting

Evaxion Biotech A/S today announced new pre-clinical data demonstrating the ability of its novel EVX-B2 mRNA gonorrhea vaccine candidate to eliminate gonorrhea bacteria by triggering a targeted immune response.

This new data provides strong Proof-of-Concept (PoC) for the mRNA-based version of EVX-B2 in a pre-clinical setting.

EVX-B2 was initially designed as a protein-based prophylactic vaccine candidate for which pre-clinical PoC has already been obtained. The novel pre-clinical data for the mRNA-version of the vaccine substantiates that AI-Immunology™ identified vaccine antigens are delivery modality agnostic and can be applied across different vaccine modalities. 

“In the case of gonorrhea, no vaccine exists today, so we have an opportunity to develop a potentially groundbreaking treatment. Further, the data confirms that our platform is delivery modality agnostic, which is a very strong value proposition towards existing and new partners,” said Christian Kanstrup, CEO of Evaxion, in a press release on September 9, 2024.

While there are no approved gonorrhea vaccines, off-table use of existing vaccines has been found to offer some protection.

A systematic review published in July 2024 evaluated the evidence of vaccine effectiveness (VE) of meningococcal B (MenB) outer membrane vesicle (OMV) vaccines against gonorrhea and a non-OMV-based vaccine (MenB-FHbp). This study concluded that 4CMenB and MenB-OMV vaccines show moderate VE against gonorrhea infection.