"The initiation of our FIH study with JCXH-105 is an important milestone for Immorna and for the development of a potential innovative vaccine for Shingles," said NgocDiep Le, M.D., Ph.D., Global Chief Medical Officer of Immorna. "If proven successful in clinical studies, JCXH-105 may become a valuable alternative to current standard-of-care to meet the large world-wide medical need for Shingles prevention. Due to its self-replicating nature, JCXH-105 may be effective at a significantly reduced dose level compared to a non-replicating conventional messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccine, and thereby may cause less reactogenicity and substantially reduce the cost of production. In addition, due to the synthetic nature of all JCXH-105 vaccine components, there are no raw material limitations or production bottlenecks."

This Phase 1 study is a randomized, double-blinded, multi-center, active-controlled study to assess the safety, immunogenicity, and determine the Recommended Phase 2 Dose (RP2D) for JCXH-105. The study will enroll healthy subjects aged 50 to 69 years. In this study, JCXH-105 will be compared to GSK's Shingrix (Zoster Vaccine, Recombinant, Adjuvanted).