Netherlands-based vaccines company Intravacc reported on Tuesday the receipt of an agreement, with base and options that may total USD9.4m, for the development of a prophylactic vaccine against enterovirus D68 (EV D68) from the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and funded in whole or in part with US Federal funds from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, National Institutes of Health, Department of Health and Human Services.

EV D68 is a respiratory virus that can cause childhood paralysis, Acute Flaccid Myelitis (AFM). The EV D68 infections have notably increased in North America, Europe and Asia. In 2014, the US experienced a large outbreak of severe respiratory disease caused by EV D68, which is increasingly been recognized as a significant respiratory pathogen in children.

Based on the Vero cell technology, the company said it will develop an inactivated EV D68 vaccine from early product selection through to Phase I clinical testing, including virus rescue, assay and process development, preclinical and toxicology studies and production of clinical trial material.

In conjunction, the company's Vero cell production platform features several distinctive advantages, including availability of GMP-grade Vero cell banks at Intravacc, a longstanding safety record for the VERO cell platform used to manufacture human vaccines as well as completely animal component free production processes that are used for development of vaccines.

The EV D68 vaccine to be developed under the contract will be the first AFM vaccine to go through to clinical development, concluded the company.