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The Board of Henderson Morley, the AIM quoted biotechnology company, is pleased to announce that further to previous announcements regarding the Company’s Collaborative Research Agreement with the Australian Centre for Vaccine Development (“ACVD”), a joint grant application is being written for submission to the US government funded National Institute of Health (“NIH”).
The joint grant application will be submitted with the goal of securing funding to further develop the Cytomegalovirus (“CMV”) Vaccine candidate (part of the PREPS and L-particles vaccine platform).
The NIH has announced a “Request for Applications” (“RFA”) specifically in the field of vaccines against diseases considered to be of significant importance, and the NIH has specifically highlighted CMV. The research goals of this RFA are to “To facilitate the development and testing of candidate vaccines”. Henderson Morley has engaged a professional US based grant writing company to advise on available grant budgets and to prepare and submit the grant application.
The grant application will be written with the goal of undertaking further research studies for a more rapid development of Henderson Morley’s vaccine candidate. The grant has to be submitted to the NIH prior to their deadline of 27th July 2009, and may be up to US $500,000 per year for up to five years.
Professor Rajiv Khanna the Director of the ACVD will be partnering the application. He has successfully applied for grant funding from the NIH in the past.
Commenting, Prof Khanna stated: “I am very pleased to be collaborating with Henderson Morley on this NIH grant proposal. CMV has been recognised by the NIH as an important pathogen with potential for a protective vaccine. I was approached by the NIH and invited to make an application under this RFA as they were aware of my research.’’
Andrew Knight, Chairman of Henderson Morley, commented: “The Company is exploring a number of avenues for securing non-dilutive funding for our research projects. We anticipate that this will be the first of several grant proposals to be made to the NIH and elsewhere. We are very pleased to be working on this proposal with Prof Khanna as his prior experience will be invaluable’’.
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