Immunomics = The Future of Vaccines
"What exactly is "immunomics" and why does it represent such an exciting opportunity?"
Good questions, to be sure, and they are right at the heart of the value of Immunomic Therapeutics, Inc. Vaccines have been developed over the years more or less through trial and error. "Inject something that looks like the infectious agent and see if it provides protection" has been the approach of vaccine scientists for decades. While this simple approach has been successful against the relatively simple targets, it has failed to produce results for some of medicine's most challengeing targets such as HIV, hepetitis C, cancer and even influenza.
Immunomics, which is the application of bioinformatics and genomics to immunology, takes much of the guess-work out of vaccine design by asking which parts of the targets will interact with the immune system before testing a new vaccine. This intelligent vaccine design process yileds better vaccine candidates in less time & with less expense while increasing the chances for success before a vaccine goes into the clinic.
As an emerging market opportunity, vaccines are opening new doors and creating substantial new markets by moving vaccines into the adult population. For the most part, vaccines have historically been viewed as addressing a pediatric need, but as vaccines develop more therapeutic applications, they are going to be increasing targeting adults. For example, ITI's allergy focus is initially intended for adult applications. This represents a paradigm shift in vaccine market development and it has caught the attention of major pharmaceutal companies.
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