Reithera, how the company of the anti Covid vaccine tested at Spallanzani was born and with whom it collaborates
Numbers, details and curiosities about the Italian company Reithera controlled by a Swiss group that produces the anti Covid vaccine tested by Spallanzani of Rome
The first all-Italian trial of the coronavirus vaccine has started. The vaccine was developed by the Reithera company and human tests are led by the Spallanzani Institute in Rome.
Who is Reithera
It is a company located in the Castel Romano technopole in the province of Rome. The company is owned by a Swiss company, Keires based in Basel , but operates in Italy and the staff are all Italian. The center brings together research, development process laboratories and a manufacturing workshop.
What does it do
Reithera is mainly involved in the development, production and clinical testing of adeno-vector vaccines of non-human origin. He worked on the vaccine against diseases such as Ebola, Hepatitis C, Malaria, Hiv.
How it was born
Reithera – as can be seen from the company website – was born in 2007 with a team founded and led by professor Riccardo Cortese. Initially they were part of Okairos, a biotech company with laboratories at CEINGE in Naples, which founded with IRBM (the institute of Pomezia that is developing the vaccine studied at the Jenner institute in Oxford) the joint venture Advent dedicated to the production of vaccines based on adenovirus. While they were developing good immunization against respiratory syncytial virus in newborns, the British pharmaceutical company Glaxo bought it. But in 2013 they restarted to found Reithera with a team of 100 employees.
Reithera's technology
Reithera has a particular and unique technique in the world: they start from the gorilla to arrive at the ready dose. About fifteen years ago they had gorilla samples sent from a German zoo. Since the species is highly protected, the most accessible biological material to ship was faeces. From there they extracted the adenovirus. It is a technology patented only by Reithera.
How the Covid vaccine works
The vaccine is transported in the body by the gorilla cold virus, deactivated, which acts as a shuttle, very powerful in terms of inducing the immune response. 90 volunteers will be injected with the vaccine. Reithera is aiming for a single dose vaccine.
The experimentation
The 90 volunteers are divided equally into two age groups: 18-55 years and 65-85 years. Both groups are in turn divided into three study arms of 15 volunteers, who will be given one of three increasing doses of GRAd-COV2. Participants will be monitored for a period of 24 weeks. The main objective is to assess safety and tolerability and then select a vaccine dose for further research to be carried out in phase II / III trials. The secondary objective, on the other hand, is to evaluate the ability of the vaccine to induce immune responses (antibodies and T cells) against the new coronavirus. Interim safety and immunogenicity analyzes are planned by October-November to guide dose selection for phase II / III studies.
The distribution
If the tests are successful, the first immunizations will be registered next spring. The company has a production capacity of millions of doses and has already anticipated that it will give priority to Italy for the distribution of the vaccine.
Collaborations
The biotech company is working with Univercells in Belgium to develop a bespoke manufacturing process to enable rapid, large-scale production of the vaccine. Furthermore, Reithera is developing a thermostable GRAd-COV2 vaccine formulation together with the German company Leukocare.
What Repubblica wrote
"Among the meadows and pines of the Roman countryside, one hundred biologists, 35 years of average age, wander around in neat and spacious laboratories, disturbed only by the workers who are renovating a wing of the building – wrote Repubblica today – We must enlarge the pharmaceutical workshop, where a new 3 thousand liter bioreactor will replace the old 200 one, to create the alchemy of a gorilla virus injected into a man's body to defeat a bat virus. The filling machine is already in motion. The bottles pass, they are filled, they are corked. The first 90 doses started from the Castel Romano company and arrived at Spallanzani in Rome, where the experimentation of the Italian vaccine, or rather the Roman countryside, is planned ”.
START MAGAZINE INSIGHTS:
REITHERA: HERE ARE THE COMPANY'S ACCOUNTS AND SHAREHOLDERS
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/innovazione/reithera-come-nata-e-con-chi-collabora-lazienda-del-vaccino-testato-allo-spallanzani/ on Tue, 25 Aug 2020 13:10:41 +0000.