OREANDA-NEWS. February 12, 2016. Regeneron Pharmaceuticals Inc. (NASDAQ: REGN) today announced that it has joined the Human Vaccines Project, a public-private partnership to help discover and develop new vaccines and immunotherapies for infectious diseases and cancer.

The Human Vaccines Project brings together leading pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, academic institutions, and government and non-profit health organizations to accelerate the development of new and improved vaccines and immunotherapies. Under the collaboration, Regeneron will provide scientific guidance and financial support for research designed to better understand the human immune response to licensed and experimental vaccines.

"At Regeneron, we are focused on turning scientific and technological expertise into improved medical outcomes," said Neil Stahl, Ph.D., Executive Vice President of Research and Development at Regeneron. "Regeneron's unique VelociSuite® technologies may enable more predictive testing of vaccines and other immunotherapies in fully-humanized and validated in vivo models, offering the potential for more precise and efficient therapeutic development. We look forward to collaborating with other world-class scientists as part of this consortium."

The Human Vaccines Project's scientific approach includes two initiatives:

  • The Human Immunome program is a seven-to-10-year effort to sequence the adaptive components of the immune system across diverse populations. This approach could provide an indispensable "parts list" that would allow for the design of highly targeted new vaccines and therapies.
  • The Rules of Immunogenicity program will conduct a large number of small, iterative clinical trials investigating immune responses to try to solve key problems that impede vaccine/immunotherapy development.

"As a long-time leader in biotechnology, Regeneron brings a science-based approach and important translational medicine capabilities to our collaboration," said Wayne C. Koff, Ph.D., Founder of the Human Vaccines Project and Chief Scientific Officer of the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative (IAVI), which incubated the Human Vaccines Project. "Given recent technological developments in genomics, bioinformatics and systems biology, we are confident that the time is right to consolidate our partners' knowledge in an innovative global consortium whose goal is to advance a new generation of vaccines and immunotherapies that could prevent or control major global diseases."

About the Human Vaccines Project The Human Vaccines Project is a non-profit public-private partnership with the mission to accelerate the development of vaccines and immunotherapies against major infectious diseases and cancers by decoding the human immune system. The Project, incubated initially at the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative (IAVI), is supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Regeneron, GSK, Aeras, MedImmune, Sanofi Pasteur, Crucell/Janssen, Vanderbilt University Medical Center, and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. The Project brings together leading academic research centers, industrial partners, nonprofits and governments to address the primary scientific barriers to developing new vaccines and immunotherapies. The Project has been endorsed by 35 of the world's leading vaccine scientists.

About Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, Inc. Regeneron (NASDAQ: REGN) is a leading science-based biopharmaceutical company based in Tarrytown, New York that discovers, invents, develops, manufactures, and commercializes medicines for the treatment of serious medical conditions. Regeneron commercializes medicines for high LDL cholesterol, eye diseases, and a rare inflammatory condition and has product candidates in development in other areas of high unmet medical need, including oncology, rheumatoid arthritis, asthma, atopic dermatitis, pain and infectious diseases. For additional information about the company, please visit www.regeneron.com or follow @Regeneron on Twitter.