OSE Immunotherapeutics will receive a grant of up to €200,000 from Nantes Metropole, a community dedicated to the development of a prophylactic vaccine against the pandemic virus SARS-CoV-2. This funding was awarded as part of the Metropolitan Fund to Support Health Innovations Linked to the COVID-19 Health Crisis.

OSE is working on the development of a prophylactic vaccine against the pandemic virus SARS-CoV-2. This research program aims to develop a prophylactic vaccine focused on memory T cells and based on a multiepitope- peptide approach (epitopes modified to induce strong and sustained CD8 immune responses).

The company is leveraging its expertise in the selection and optimization of disease-relevant peptides and using its established Memopi neo-epitope optimization technology to increase the memory immune response of T lymphocytes against specific antigens.

Using a bioinformatics approach and algorithms for predicting immunogenicity in the virus genome, OSE Immunotherapeutics’ R&D team has screened a large number of peptides derived from different proteins of SARS-CoV-2, SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV (coronavirus of the Middle East respiratory syndrome) and has selected the immuno-dominant epitopes from 8 major proteins of coronaviruses.