The Vaccine Group

The Vaccine Group is developing novel herpesvirus-based vaccines to protect against infectious diseases that can have significant social and economic impact. They fall into two broad categories:

  • Zoonotic diseases, such as COVID-19, which jump from animals to humans
  • Diseases which have a high impact on production of economically important livestock

The company is using its recombinant viral vector technology to create vaccine delivery platforms for viral and bacterial pathogens to address a growing number of diseases. With the exception of the COVID-19 vaccine, which is being developed for humans, they are all for use in animals:

  • Sars-CoV-2, the cause of COVID-19: pre-clinical trial data show TVG’s vaccines have the potential to provide broad immunity against Sars-CoV-2 and current and future variants, such as Omicron
  • Lassa fever: the disease kills about 5,000 people each year
  • Ebola: a rare and deadly disease in people and nonhuman primates, such as gorillas and monkeys, which kills about half the people it infects.
  • Streptococcus suis: an emerging zoonotic disease in pigs which causes meningitis and septicaemia in people
  • Bovine tuberculosis: an infectious disease in cattle, which can also infect humans. It costs the UK £100 million a year to control
  • Porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome (PRRS): a widespread disease in pigs, which has an economic impact of $560 million a year in the US and €1.5 billion in Europe
  • African swine fever virus: a severe disease in pigs, with very high mortality. A 2019 outbreak in China is estimated to have caused losses of $141 billion.

TVG was founded in 2017 to develop and commercialise the work of Dr Michael Jarvis, Associate Professor of Virology and Immunology at the University of Plymouth’s School of Biomedical Sciences, and the company’s Chief Scientific Officer. To date, work has been funded by a mix of public grants and equity investment. Its business model is to develop vaccines to proof of concept stage and then license them to manufacturers for commercial exploitation.