SAIC Receives NIH-NIAID Contract to Assist in Development of Malaria Vaccine     

MCLEAN, VA - October 18, 2000 - The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) of the National Institutes of Health has awarded a contract to Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) to assist in the development of promising candidates for a malaria vaccine. This project is to be funded in whole or in part with federal funds under Contract No. N01-AI-05421. The estimated contract value over the seven-year period of performance is $43 million.

The work will support four areas of vaccine development: project management and intellectual property issues; process development; scale-up to pilot production; and regulatory submissions. This project will advance promising laboratory concepts toward subsequent clinical trials that will be conducted by the NIAID through its clinical research and field-testing sites.

SAIC will be the overall project manager and integrator, with nine principal subcontractors for process development, pilot-scale production, formulation development and testing. The subcontractors are: Bell-More Labs, Inc. of Hampstead, Md.; Bio Science Contract Production Corp. located in Baltimore, Md.; Chesapeake Biological Laboratories, Inc. of Baltimore, Md.; EntreMed, Inc. of Rockville, Md.; McKesson HBOC of Rockville, Md.; Multiple Peptide Systems of San Diego, Calif.; Novavax, Inc. of Columbia, Md.; Peptide Technologies Corporation located in Gaithersburg, Md.; and TherImmune Research Corporation of Gaithersburg, Md.

William Bancroft, M.D., principal investigator, and Michael Hollingdale, Ph.D., co-principal investigator, will lead the SAIC team. Bancroft of SAIC formerly was the U.S. Army's research area director for infectious disease research from 1990 to 1997. Hollingdale, recently the head of the School of Biology at the University of Leeds, is an internationally recognized researcher with more than 20 years experience studying malaria antigens, the immune responses to malaria and evaluating strategies to develop a malaria vaccine.

Malaria is a serious disease worldwide, claiming the lives of 1.5 million children and adults annually. A number of drugs have been developed to prevent and treat malaria infections, but the parasites develop resistance to these drugs. Vaccination is a preferable means for malaria control. A vaccine has been sought for several decades with limited success.

"Advancements in biotechnology during the last 15 years offer new approaches to the development of a successful vaccine," said Joseph F. Soukup, group senior vice president at SAIC. "SAIC is honored to have been selected for such an important program in international health."

SAIC is a Fortune 500 company and the nation's largest employee-owned research and engineering firm. We provide information technology, systems integration and eBusiness products and services to commercial and government customers. SAIC engineers and scientists work to solve complex technical problems in telecommunications, national security, health care, transportation, energy, the environment and financial services. More information about SAIC and its subsidiaries can be found at www.saic.com.