ORT-VAC: live bacterial vectors for vaccine delivery

We aim to revolutionise vaccination by developing an innovative oral vaccine delivery technology. Traditional vaccines require extensive and costly production, purification, formulation and storage, with needles used for administration. We will engineer live enteric ORT-VAC bacteria to carry plasmids expressing antigens. These uniquely enable stable, high-copy number plasmid maintenance without antibiotic resistance or other selectable marker genes, making them particularly suited for delivering DNA vaccines against influenza and HIV, which will also be developed by the consortium. Encapsulation technology will be optimised to enable the bacteria to be stored at ambient temperature, ingested and released into the small intestine, where they will stimulate a protective immune response. ORT-VAC therefore represents a cost-effective platform technology with built-in stability, adjuvanticity and efficacy.