The laboratory led by Herman Staats, PhD, has been awarded a National Institutes of Health (NIH) R21 grant application titled “Developing RNA Vaccines to Treat Peanut Hypersensitivity.” The two-year grant supports studies to evaluate the use of nasally-administered RNA vaccines expressing a peanut allergen to desensitize pre-existing peanut allergy in a mouse model of peanut allergy.
This grant represents a collaboration between Staats, lab member Brandi Johnson-Weaver, PhD, and Kurt Ristroph, PhD, an Assistant Professor of Agricultural and Biological Engineering at Purdue University. Ristroph’s laboratory will utilize their flash nanoprecipitation nanoparticle technology to encapsulate the peanut mRNA vaccines for nasal delivery.
This grant will support the Lab’s ongoing work to treat peanut allergies. Five months ago, in September 2022, The Staats Lab was awarded an Adjuvant Comparison Contract by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) to perform multi-omics characterization of vaccine adjuvants when used as immunotherapeutics to treat peanut allergy. The contract was funded for one year at $1.1 million, with a possible additional four years of funding of $1.1 million per year. There are also other contract options for 1) testing additional adjuvant sets as assigned by the NIH and 2) additional omics testing related to the original adjuvant set, pending available funding. Read more about that contract here.