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ARTICLE | Emerging Company Profile

The universe in an exosome

Versatope is banking on E. coli exosomes and M2 for a universal flu vaccine

July 26, 2018 7:06 PM UTC

Versatope Therapeutics Inc. is using exosomes from commensal E. coli as the backbone of a universal influenza vaccine that should be cheaper and easier to manufacture than other vesicle-based vaccines.

The company’s technology was developed by scientific co-founder David Putnam, a professor of biomedical engineering at Cornell University. Putnam and colleagues engineered non-pathogenic strains of commensal E. coli that produce low levels of LPS to reduce immunogenicity and high numbers of exosomes to simplify harvesting, then used E. coli clyA to fuse antigen-derived polypeptides on the vesicle surface. To produce a vaccine with universal potential, the team fused a string of M2 ectodomain polypeptides from multiple influenza strains to the exosomes...