iBioPharma Selects Influenza Vaccine As First Drug Candidate

iBioPharma, a biopharmaceutical company, has selected a plant-made influenza vaccine as its first product candidate for clinical development.

Favorable efficacy data from preclinical studies in the ferret model have influenced the company’s decision. Ferrets are the standard species for testing the efficacy of candidate influenza vaccines prior to human clinical trials.

Robert Kay, chairman and CEO of iBioPharma, said: “The ferret data convinced us to accelerate our plan to evaluate our flu vaccine candidate in humans. We expect to file our investigational new drug application with the FDA during the second quarter of 2009.

“Using our plant-based technologies to produce flu vaccines, we address some of the major concerns of scalability, cost, time efficiency and lack of surge capacity that affect current methods of production.”