Business
TVG - key partner in $9.67m DARPA project award
TVG - key partner in $9.67m DARPA project award.
About this update from Frontier Ip Group Plc
[{"type":"text","content":"\n \nRNS Number : 5367Q Frontier IP Group plc 20 February 2019 \n\nRNS \nAIM: FIPP\n20th February 2019 \n \nFrontier IP Group Plc\n(\"Frontier IP\" or the \"Group\")\n \n \nPortfolio news - The Vaccine Group to be a key partner in DARPA project awarded up to US$9.67m (£7.4m) to protect US military and homeland against Ebola and Lassa fever\n \nFrontier IP portfolio company The Vaccine Group (the \"Company\" or \"TVG\") is to play a central role in a multi-million-dollar project to protect US military forces and homeland from Ebola, Lassa fever and other deadly zoonotic viruses that jump from animals to humans. \n \nThe University of Plymouth spin out is a principal partner in an international team of scientists awarded up to US$9.67million (£7.4 million) by the US government's Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (the \"Agency\" or \"DARPA\"). The Company was established by Dr Michael Jarvis, Associate Professor in Immunology and Virology in the University's Institute of Translational and Stratified Medicine. \n \nThe project is led by the One Health Institute in the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine and the Center for Comparative Medicine in the UC Davis schools of Medicine and Veterinary Medicine.\n \nTVG's role will be to develop novel vaccine technologies which enable scalable vaccination of remote and hard-to-reach wildlife animal populations that harbour zoonotic viruses. Frontier IP, which provides commercialisation services to university spin outs in return for equity, holds a 19.2 per cent stake in TVG. \n \nThe aim of the three-and-a-half-year project, part of DARPA's Preventing Emerging Pathogenic Threats (PREEMPT) program, is to predict where zoonotic viruses might arise and then prevent them from spilling over into humans. \n \nTVG's other partners in the project will work on analytic tools to predict when a zoonotic virus in a geographic hot spot is most likely to make the jump from animals into humans. \n \nAlthough PREEMPT is intended to protect US military service members and the local communities where they operate, it reflects increasing concern among global health agencies about the potential pandemics emerging from animals to infect humans. Diseases can arise from domestic and wild animals, including fruit bats, gorillas, pigs,...