Next Generation Vaccine Platform Leveraging Skin Immunity to Provide Disease-Modifying Treatment of Parkinson’s Disease

Parkinson’s Disease (PD) is a major neurodegenerative disorder with no established treatment modalities capable of modifying disease pathology, and no means of early diagnosis. Vaccines targeting aSyn aggregates are a promising route to disease-modifying therapy for PD, but the current generation of PD vaccines utilise conventional formulations, which are limited in their immunogenicity and require substantial quantities of adjuvant to achieve efficacy. NEXGEN’s proprietary WISIT vaccine platform is the first of the novel class of gluconeoconjugate vaccines (GNCVs), which are administered intradermally and specifically formulated to leverage skin dendritic cells (DCs) to generate substantially stronger and more specific immune responses than conventional vaccines. These stronger immune responses allow substantial reduction in adjuvants, while simultaneously increasing therapy efficacy. NEXGEN will identify and characterise candidate WISIT constructs targeting aSyn (PD-WISITs) and develop a novel extracellular vesicle (EV)-based biomarker assay that enables early diagnosis of PD using liquid biopsies, suitable for point of care use. Safety and efficacy of PD-WISITs will be demonstrated preclinically, before being translated to first-in-human Phase I/Ib clinical trials, along with the novel EV-based biomarker assay. The results of NEXGEN will be the extraordinary accomplishments of cheap and effective disease-modifying treatment of early PD and a novel biomarker assay to diagnose and guide prodromal/early PD treatment. Further still, GNCV technology will be clinically demonstrated, which has the potential to be transformative to the treatment of a wide range of additional diseases, resulting in far-reaching impacts to the health of millions.