Archivel Farma seeks partners for third phase of tuberculosis vaccine
Positive results of phase II study on RUTI® vaccine have just been published
Catalan biopharmaceutical firm Archivel Farma aims to transfer leadership of their RUTI® tuberculosis vaccine project to one or more partners. The company has restructured its staff to ease entry of new partners able to assume the cost of starting the third phase of development on RUTI®, which is expected to last nearly two and a half years and cost a minimum of €5 millions.
Archivel has signed a collaboration agreement with a company specializing in the development and management of international agreements in the life sciences sector (Trifermed) in order to reach their main goal for 2014: for this final phase to be carried out and for the vaccine to reach the market.
The quality of the RUTI® vaccine is made amply clear in the study published in February 2014 in the journal PLOS ONE, which demonstrates the positive results in phase II. Moreover, the World Health Organization (WHO) included it in their Global Tuberculosis Report 2013 as one of the 12 therapeutic vaccines that may potentially prevent this pathology.
Although the death rate for this disease has dropped 45% in the past 25 years, 1.3 million people around the world died of tuberculosis in 2012, according to data from the WHO.
More information is available in the Archivel Farma press release.