BiondVax Pharmaceuticals Ltd., a clinical stage biopharmaceutical company based in Israel that creates and markets immunomodulation therapies to treat infectious diseases, recently launched a universal vaccine onto the market.
Despite many medical advances, influenza continues to be a major health concern each year. The flu is life-threatening for people who are elderly or who have compromised immune systems.
Typically, people assume that the flu will only be a cold. Unfortunately, there are between 250,000 and 500,000 people who die from the flu every year. Most of these deaths are due to cardiovascular and pulmonary complications.
These figures emphasize the need that the medical community has for a universal vaccine that will protect people from contracting influenza. The current vaccines and approaches are not 100 percent effective, leaving people vulnerable to the influenza.
Part of the problem is there are approximately 40,000 influenza strains that are recorded and tested against treatments. This is an impossible number of strains to fit into a single vaccine.
“The current vaccine, despite the fact that the market is around $3 billion a year, just doesn’t work properly,” Kenny Green of GK Investor Relations, BiondVax’s investor relations contact, said. “If your car works only 10 percent of the time, you probably wouldn’t buy something like that. There’s this huge market for something that really doesn’t work.”
