Viral vaccines, oncolytic viruses, viral vectors… Viruses are the specialty of Naobios (35 people), a company based in Saint-Herblain near Nantes, which has been handling them since 2005. Subsidiary of the Clean Biologics group (240 employees, 33 million employees). ‘euros of turnover), Naobios has just entered into a partnership with the European Vaccine Initiative (EVI), a European entity which aims to develop effective and affordable vaccines for global health. Together, they intend to produce a “challenge agent”, in other words the virus against which a vaccine must act, produced in the laboratory. The latter is used for clinical trials, and intended to be injected into healthy volunteers, under very controlled conditions. Participants are then closely monitored by researchers and doctors to protect them from potential harmful side effects.
A mobilization against the respiratory syncytial virus
The financial terms of the agreement between Naobios and the EVI were not disclosed. Both entities will focus on the production of a respiratory syncytial virus challenge agent. According to the World Health Organization, this virus is responsible for approximately 33 million cases of acute respiratory infections globally each year, leading to more than 3.2 million hospitalizations and up to 150,000 deaths. .
“Challenge agents experienced a strong resurgence of interest during the Covid-19 crisis, because we had to move very quickly”
This virus mainly affects infants. The production of this challenge agent will make it possible to set up controlled infection trials in humans. Indeed, the advantage of these products is not to wait for random exposure to the real virus to know the effectiveness of a vaccine. This accelerates clinical trials and gives hope that vaccines developed against this pathology will be on the market more quickly. “Challenge agents experienced a strong resurgence of interest during the Covid-19 crisis, because we had to move very quickly,” analyzes Eric Le Forestier, general manager of Naobios.
Popular agent challenges
Naobios has been working on these challenge agents for a short time, only since 2022. But the Nantes company has already proven itself, having successfully produced 15 batches of various viral strains. “This partnership with EVI marks an important step in our mission to leverage challenge agents to accelerate the production of effective and accessible vaccines for regions of the world that have difficulty preventing viral epidemics,” notes in a press release Eric Le Forestier. Witness to this rise in power, Naobios received a grant of 1.7 million euros from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation at the end of 2023 to produce a challenge agent for the Omicron variant of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
