Dream Vaccines Foundation

What does Dream Vaccines for the twenty-first century mean?
Some of the vaccines that we are all familiar with today such as polio, small pox, rabies, etc. are based on a first generation of vaccine technology that has not changed in the last fifty years. While these vaccines radically limit the spread of many infectious diseases and drastically improve global public health, the technology remains simple, outdated, and these vaccines can sometimes produce undesirable side effects. They are cheap, ubiquitous, and do not generate interesting profit margins for pharmaceutical companies.

As vaccine technology evolved during the '80s and '90s with advances in protein engineering, a second generation of vaccines appeared on the market such as hepatitis B, meningitis, HIV, and malaria, etc. Due to the complexity of certain diseases such as HIV and malaria, vaccines for these diseases failed or reached low to mid vaccine efficacy, reinforcing the belief that efficient vaccines for complex diseases such as HIV/AIDS and malaria are impossible to achieve. Additional technology and vaccine approaches were needed to improve vaccine efficacy for these complex diseases.

Only during the last decade, knowledge about protein structure, and more recently, better understanding of protein recognition by the immune system, allow Dream Vaccines to further pursue a third generation of vaccines to tackle life-threatening infectious diseases such as HIV/AIDS and malaria.

We call our vaccines dream vaccines because we are applying twenty-first century biotechnology and an innovative approach to develop vaccines for the world’s two largest infectious killers, HIV-1/AIDS and malaria, and other infectious diseases. This new generation of dream vaccines means vaccines that are:

Innovative due to high technology and vaccine design
Designed to optimize immune response for complex diseases
Safe and well tolerated
Under researched because unprofitable
Affordable