From animals to humans
Posted on October 28th, 2008 – 6:22 PMBy Thomas Lee
Syntiron LLC said Tuesday that it received a $3.8 million contract from the U.S. Department of Defense to help combat bioterrorism.
The startup, housed at the University Enterprise Laboratories incubator in St. Paul, will use the money from the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) to develop vaccines against anthrax, yersinia pestis, and burkholderia pseudomallei. DTRA is charged with defending the country from weapons of mass destruction.
Syntiron is a collaboration between Epitopix LLC and Wilmar Poultry Corp. to convert the former’s animal vaccine technology into treatments for humans.
“This contract will expand our program of adapting the Epitopix technology to human vaccines, and demonstrates synergy betweeen veterinary and human biotech organizations in the State of Minnesota,” Syntiron CEO Joseph Shaw said in a statement. “This contract is only a precursor of the potential of our vaccines to prevent disease in not only the area of bioterrorism but against devestating bacterial infections in both the developed and devleoping worlds, in the face of increasing antibiotic resistance, and spread of disease.”
