GeoVax to Present at World Vaccine & Immunotherapy Conference

Two Separate Presentations to Focus on the Company’s Infectious Disease Vaccines and Cancer Immunotherapy Programs

ATLANTA, GA, Dec. 03, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- via NEWMEDIAWIRE -- GeoVax Labs, Inc. (OTC: GOVX), a biotechnology company specializing in developing human vaccines, announced today that its Chief Scientific Officer, Farshad Guirakhoo, PhD, will be a featured speaker at the World Vaccine & Immunotherapy conference, being held December 2-5, 2019 in San Francisco, California. 

On Wednesday, December 4, Dr. Guirakhoo will deliver a presentation entitled, “Development of Single-Dose Vaccines for Emerging and Re-Emerging Infectious Diseases, Preclinical Data for Ebola, Marburg, Lassa Fever and Zika as Examples.” During a second presentation on that day entitled, “Utilizing a Live Modified Vaccinia Ankara Virus to Deliver Tumor Associated Antigen MUC1 on the Surface of Virus Like Particles for Prevention or Treatments of MUC1 Positive Tumors”, Dr. Guirakhoo will discuss the use of GeoVax’s technology toward development of cancer immunotherapies.

GeoVax’s Modified Vaccinia Ankara (MVA) platform technology is built on a 5th generation MVA vector system that is improved for high expression and stable transgenes during manufacture. Similar to its parent MVA, it has the advantages of being a live replication-competent vector in avian cells for manufacturing, yet replication-deficient in mammalian cells for vaccination, thus inherently safe. Importantly, MVA vaccines elicit protective T cell as well as antibody responses in animals and humans. The GeoVax MVA platform can be combined with the potent immunogenicity of Virus Like Particles (VLPs) (insertion of multiple antigens from each pathogen of interest conferring broad protection) or be used to express proteins in their native conformations, enabling construction of vaccine candidates that induce full protection after a single dose. Single dose protection is a favourable characteristic of preventive vaccines for emerging infectious disease outbreak response, given the speed of spread of pathogens and the impracticality of multi-dose regimens in the under-resourced settings where outbreaks often occur. MVA-VLP vaccine candidates against various virus families (e.g. Ebola, Marburg, Lassa and Zika) induced strong antibody and T cell responses and demonstrated broad protections after single dose vaccinations against lethal challenges.

Built upon the MVA-VLP platform, GeoVax’s preventive HIV vaccine has demonstrated robust and durable immune responses in clinical trials involving more than 500 subjects and is currently being evaluated in 2 independent phase 1 studies aiming at providing a “functional cure” for HIV infected individuals. Similar to our HIV therapeutic approaches where combination of drugs and vaccine platforms are required to provide cure for chronically infected individuals, our cancer vaccines will also be used in combination with peptide vaccines and checkpoint inhibitors which have already shown some positive effects in clinics. 

About GeoVax

GeoVax Labs, Inc. is a clinical-stage biotechnology company developing human vaccines against infectious diseases and cancer using a novel patented MVA-VLP based vaccine platform. On this platform, MVA, a large virus capable of carrying several vaccine antigens, expresses proteins that assemble into VLP immunogens within (in vivo) the person receiving the vaccine. The production of VLPs in the person being vaccinated mimics virus production in a natural infection, stimulating both the humoral and cellular arms of the immune system to recognize, prevent, and control the target infection. The MVA-VLP derived vaccines elicit durable immune responses in the host similar to a live-attenuated virus, while providing the safety characteristics of a replication-defective vector.

GeoVax’s current development programs are focused on preventive vaccines against HIV, Zika, hemorrhagic fever viruses (Ebola, Sudan, Marburg, and Lassa), and malaria, as well as therapeutic vaccines against chronic Hepatitis B infections and multiple cancers. The Company has designed the leading preventative HIV vaccine candidate to fight against the subtype of HIV prevalent in the larger commercial markets of the Americas, Western Europe, Japan, and Australia; this program is currently undergoing human clinical trials managed by the HIV Vaccine Trials Network (HVTN) with the support of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).  GeoVax’s HIV vaccine is also part of collaborative efforts to develop an immunotherapy as a functional cure for HIV.  For more information, visit .