The Staats Lab was recently 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. Adjuvants are substances used to enhance the efficacy of vaccines and studies performed in this contract will provide in-depth multi-omics characterization of novel adjuvants that may enhance the efficacy of sublingual immunotherapy for peanut allergy.
The contract is 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.
The contract represents an extensive collaboration between the Staats Lab (Herman Staats, PhD, and Brandi Johnson-Weaver, PhD, and Fang Wang) and other Duke laboratories, including the laboratory of Qianben Wang, PhD (Department of Pathology); Michael Dee Gunn, MD (Department of Medicine); Andrew MacIntyre, PhD (Duke Human Vaccine Institute); and Cliburn Chan, MBBB, MS, PhD and Josh Granek, PhD (Department of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics).
Collaborators outside of Duke University include Mike Kulis, PhD, and Johanna Smeekens, PhD (University of North Carolina School of Medicine Food Allergy Initiative; and Jay Evans, PhD, and Shannon Miller, PhD from InImmune, a biotechnology company focused on developing the next generation of vaccines and immunotherapeutics.
“Thanks, everyone, for your work to get this contract funded,” remarked Staats.
*Pictured in photo left to right: Brandi Johnson-Weaver, PhD, and Herman Staats, PhD