On Jul. 16, 2020, Dynavax Technologies and the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai announced they had entered into a collaboration to develop a universal influenza (flu) vaccine.

Mount Sinai’s work in this area was funded under a contract award from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases as part of the Collaborative Influenza Vaccine Innovation Centers (CIVICs) program established by NIAID.

The Mount Sinai CIVICs team planned to evaluate a novel approach they have developed called chimeric hemagglutinin (cHA) designed to protect against all strains of influenza in combination with Dynavax’s CpG 1018TM adjuvant.