Company Profile

FluGen is a biopharmaceutical company organized around the prevention and treatment of both seasonal and pandemic influenza worldwide. The company addresses three specific areas: increasing vaccine virus yields in cell culture, developing better influenza vaccines and producing new ways to treat the disease. Grounded in a novel influenza vaccine technology first invented at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the laboratories of Drs Kawaoka and Neumann and exclusively licensed to FluGen, the firm has developed REDEE FLU™, an influenza vaccine. Flu vaccines have remained virtually unchanged for decades, relying on an approach that provides very poor protection against the virus for the world’s population. Current flu vaccines rely on injecting a inactivated or deadened virus which is matched annually to prevalent strains. The novelty behind the RedeeFlu™ vaccine is that the M2-deleted viruses activate the body’s immune defenses just like a wild type influenza infection without production of infectious viruses. RedeeFlu™ induces potent innate immune responses (the body’s defense triggered when cells produce influenza RNA), humoral or antibody immune responses (inducing the production of antibodies that recognized influenza virus surface proteins) and cellular immune responses (triggering T cells that can destroy influenza infected cells). This is in contrast to inactivated influenza vaccines that only produce limited antibody responses to the surface of the virus or other live flu vaccines that are attenuated and require multi-cycle replication or cell-to-cell spreading for potency. In multiple preclinical models, the RedeeFlu™ viruses have been found to be safe and induce robust immune responses that protect against “drifted” strains, mismatched influenza strains and protect against disease