Vactech: a vaccine to prevent type 1 diabetes

Among the newest members of Finnish Bioindustries is Vactech Oy, a Tampere-based biotechnology company developing a preventive vaccine against type 1 diabetes. Founded in 2001 as a University of Tampere spin-off, the company grew out of years of scientific work on the origins of type 1 diabetes by its two founders — virologist Heikki Hyöty (Tampere University) and paediatrician Mikael Knip (University of Helsinki).

The premise is a bold one: that a disease long understood as autoimmune could, in part, be set off by a virus — and might therefore be prevented by a vaccine.

"We set ourselves an ambitious goal: to prevent this disease," recalls Hyöty of the company's beginnings.

Hunting a viral trigger

Type 1 diabetes is a chronic condition in which the body destroys its own insulin-producing cells in the pancreas. Genetic susceptibility plays a part, but it doesn't act alone — an environmental trigger is needed to set the process in motion. For years, Hyöty and his colleagues searched for that trigger, and one group of viruses kept surfacing: enteroviruses, and specifically the Coxsackie B group.

The parallel the team draws is polio. Poliovirus is itself an enterovirus, and the disease it once caused was brought under control by a vaccine. Vactech's question was whether the same could be done for the enteroviruses implicated in type 1 diabetes. In a large systematic study of clinical samples, the company helped pinpoint the Coxsackie B viruses most strongly associated with the disease — the foundation for a vaccine designed to target them.

Coxsackie B infections are common and usually mild, but they are linked to a wider range of conditions — from serious illness in young infants to, increasingly, celiac disease. That has made the work relevant well beyond diabetes alone.

CEO Tero Välimaa and Co-Founder Professor Heikki Hyöty

A vaccine built on proven technology

Rather than reaching for a novel platform, Vactech deliberately chose a well-established one. Its candidate is a whole-virus, chemically inactivated vaccine — the same class of technology as the inactivated polio vaccine used safely in children worldwide. It is multivalent, combining several Coxsackie B strains, and requires no adjuvant. For a first-in-human vaccine aimed at preventing an immune-mediated disease, that long safety track record matters.

Where the company stands

Developed in a strategic partnership with the US company Provention Bio, Vactech's vaccine candidate has already completed a first-in-human Phase I trial in healthy adult volunteers. The results were encouraging: the vaccine was well tolerated, with no unexpected safety concerns, and generated durable, high levels of virus-neutralising antibodies shown to persist throughout the whole two-year trial follow-up period.

Vactech holds exclusive rights to the vaccine and is taking it into its next stage. Because the disease process that leads to type 1 diabetes often begins in the first years of life, the next planned trial — a Phase 1b study — will be conducted in children, with the longer-term aim of a vaccine given in infancy, much as the polio vaccine is today. Manufacturing for this trial is already under way.

The company's approach is protected by patents held exclusively by Vactech, placing it in a leading international position in this field. Alongside diabetes, celiac disease is included as a second endpoint in its trial programme.

For Hyöty, Vactech also stands for something he'd like to see more of in Finland: genuinely close collaboration between universities and companies. Finland may not have the deep capital pools of larger countries, he argues, but it has world-class science and a certain agility — and the country's next success stories will come from removing the barriers, and the lingering preconceptions, between academic research and industry.

The stakes are hard to overstate. Type 1 diabetes is a lifelong condition, and Finland has the highest incidence of it in the world. Today, even the best care manages the disease symptoms rather than preventing the disease itself. A vaccine that could stop the process before it starts — given routinely in infancy, like the polio vaccine — would be one of the most significant advances the field has seen. It is an ambitious goal, and still years of work away, but it is exactly the kind of long-horizon science that turns into a breakthrough.

We're delighted to welcome Vactech to Finnish Bioindustries.

Learn more: vactech.fi