133655Generation of a clinical universal flu vaccine candidateClosedFeasibility StudiesInnovate UK"Influenza pandemics have been a recurrent health event through-out history. The infamous Spanish Flu of 1918, resulted in up to 100 million deaths - 5% of the world population. The most recent international pandemic took the shape of H1N1 virus in 2009\. The virulent H3N2 strain that resulted in \>225,000 infections in Australia is currently making a particularly dangerous UK winter flu season (1). For this reason, governments are particularly concerned about the risks of Influenza pandemics to public health. The UK government 2015 ""National Risk register of Civil Emergencies"" highlighted an Influenza pandemic as one the highest risk events in terms of both impact and likelihood. The register also predicts that the consequences of a pandemic is half the UK population potentially being infected, with between 20,000 and 750,000 additional deaths potentially by its end. Vaccines remain the gold standard of defence against pandemics. Since large scale influenza pandemics can occur rapidly and unexpectedly, resulting from novel strains and mutations, there remains a need for vaccines that can be developed quickly and on-demand while also being effective against those strains and mutations. Current seasonal influenza vaccine technologies do not fit this need. Manufacture of such vaccines is often slow, experiences batch variation, and cannot be scaled to meet the needs of large vaccination regimes. Furthermore, since the pandemic strain will result from a new strain, seasonal influenza vaccines could not be expected to provide any protection against pandemic influenza. This is illustrated by the effectiveness of seasonal flu vaccine ranging from 60% to as low as 10%. The UK government has shown a desire for mass stockpiling of influenza vaccines for preparedness in case of pandemics, with a desired stock of up to 6 months' supply. However, the UK government has recently highlighted current vaccine technologies inadequate, both in terms of effectiveness and shelf-life. To meet this need Emergex will apply its proprietary gold nanoparticle synthetic T-cell vaccine platform to the generation and validation of a universal Influenza vaccine. Since these vaccines would utilise universal viral epitopes it would be effective against all Influenza strains. The synthetic nature means the vaccine would have extensive shelf-life and the production process fast, cheap and highly scalable. The small nanoparticle size means our vaccines are suited to be administered by a microneedle skin patch, which could be distributed by post, allowing a practical and cost-effective method of mass vaccination."