Partnership with Boston-area startup could help other projects

Leveraging the University’s Center for Vaccine Research, an NIH Regional Biocontainment Laboratory, Tiba scientists are collaborating with researchers at the University of Pittsburg to advance a novel COVID-19 mRNA vaccine. This effort, led at Pitt by Dr. William Klimstra in partnership with Tiba Biotech, a 2-year-old company from the Boston area, is not aimed at competing to be one of the first vaccines to market, as Dr. Paul Duprex’s work still could be.

This third vaccine effort uses a novel method of creating a molecule with synthetic RNA inside of it that theoretically would trick the body into thinking it was being attacked by the real coronavirus — without giving a person a version of a live virus, as most existing vaccines do — and potentially making it safer and more potent than other RNA vaccine efforts already underway.

We also don’t know how long the COVID crisis will go on,” said Dr. Christian Mandl, Tiba’s acting chief science officer and the person credited with bringing Pitt and Tiba together through his long friendship with Dr. Duprex and Dr. Klimstra. “One potential scenario is that this goes on for quite a number of years, that we have vaccines that are okay, but have room for improvement.

To get their partnership moving, Dr. Klimstra was able to convert an existing NIH grant for work on Eastern Equine Encephalitis into work on a coronavirus vaccine, something the NIH has allowed during the pandemic. His application to do that was approved just last week, allowing him to use about $1 million he already had been awarded in a grant to work on the project with Tiba. He should have the money in a few weeks.

For more details, see the article: A third COVID-19 vaccine effort is quietly underway at Pitt