ARPA-H announces awards to develop computational platform for multi-virus vaccine design 

APECx performer teams aim to eliminate viruses as future health threats 

The Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H), an agency within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), today announced teams to receive awards from its Antigens Predicted for Broad Viral Efficacy through Computational Experimentation (APECx) program. The agency’s commitment is up to $204 million to develop computational toolkits to design vaccines that target many viruses at once.  

“ARPA-H is investing in groundbreaking tools for vaccine design on a scale that has not been possible before,” said  ARPA-H Director Renee Wegrzyn, Ph.D. “With APECx, we aim to revolutionize vaccine development and accessibility in the U.S. and around the globe by harnessing these machine learning tools to prevent today’s viral infections and get ahead of tomorrow’s.”  

The teams selected by ARPA-H will focus on predictive modeling and machine learning tools to design proteins that can act as broadly effective antigens. These antigens will be developed into novel vaccine candidates against existing and unknown viral threats. By leveraging these emerging tools, the APECx platform intends to uncover the protein structures necessary to understand viruses and design more broadly effective, safe, and accessible vaccines.  

“APECx and our performer teams intend to transform vaccine antigen design,“ said ARPA-H APECx Program Manager Andy Kilianski, Ph.D. “First by developing computational toolkits to design broadly effective antigens, targeting entire viral families, and then demonstrating their accuracy by evaluating the vaccine candidates in clinical trials. Novel methodologies are needed to successfully produce broad-spectrum immunogens and APECx will be generating the data and creating the models to make that a possibility."  

APECx will pursue three technical areas: high-throughput biochemical analysis and protein engineering, protein modeling toolkit development for antigen design, and translational candidate development and clinical evaluation. Antigens and targets identified through these technical areas will then be evaluated for their ability to target entire viral families with a single vaccine.  

Teams pursuing broadly effective vaccine candidates are led by: 

• La Jolla Institute for Immunology focusing on beta and gamma-herpesvirus antigen and vaccine candidate development, including cytomegalovirus infections. 
• University of Washington focusing on alpha and gamma-herpesvirus antigen and vaccine candidate development, including herpes simplex virus infections. 
• Vaccine Company, Inc. focusing on vaccine development for flaviviruses, which include threats such as West Nile virus, dengue virus, and Zika virus. 
• Vanderbilt University focusing on antigen design and vaccine candidate development against alphaviruses, such as Chikungunya virus and Eastern equine encephalitis virus. 

ARPA-H has also selected a team led by the Texas A&M Engineering Experiment Station focusing on data and tool integration across the program. Their goal is to create a protein design pipeline that will be optimized to immunogen development for all purposes, including vaccines and therapeutics against bacterial pathogens, cancer, and other health threats.  

The performers’ awards are ceilings, based on each performer meeting its contractual milestones. 

For more on APECx, visit the APECx program page.