MVMD is pleased to announce the appointment of Dr. Elizabeth Norton to an advisory position at MVMD to support our key vaccine and cold chain projects. Dr. Norton’s skill and expertise will be instrumental as we look at applying our Quicksome™ technology across an expanded variety of human and animal health vaccines with the goal of improving global vaccine access and effectiveness.
Dr. Norton is an immunologist who brings 20 years of experience in evaluating immunity, vaccines, and microbial infections. She has a public health and research background with a current faculty appointment in the Department of Microbiology & Immunology at Tulane University in Louisiana, U.S., as Associate Professor with tenure.
Dr. Norton began her training at the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and received an MPH (Master of Public Health) in international health. In her doctoral and post-doctoral programs at Tulane University she evaluated innate immunomodulation and mucosal delivery techniques, with a main focus of her lab to evaluate strategies to improve memory responses to vaccines through mucosal adjuvants. Her work has involved management of large, collaborative projects for adjuvanted polio and tuberculosis vaccines, and has also pioneered a derivative adjuvant for intranasal use in pneumonia, opioid, and influenza vaccines. Since the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, Dr. Norton also runs a project for the Tulane University Convalescent Antibody and Immunity Network (TUCAIN) NIH/NCI U54 evaluating cellular and memory responses to SARS-CoV-2 infection or vaccine responses in adults, children, and cancer subjects and oversees blood and tissue collections.
Dr. Norton has been consistently NIH (National Institutes of Health) funded since 2013, authored over 30 peer-reviewed publications, received 3 patents, served on numerous NIH and other study sections and is a national and international speaker in her field.
Dr. Norton will be assuming the advisory responsibilities of Dr. John D. Clements, who is formally retiring from his advisory role within MVMD. Dr. John Clements is Emeritus Professor of Microbiology and Immunology at Tulane University School of Medicine, with over 35 years of experience in vaccine, immunology and infectious diseases research and development. Dr. Clements has brought invaluable expertise and support to help advance Mountain Valley MD’s ongoing Quicksome™ vaccine delivery projects. Dr. Clements will continue to provide support on an ad-hoc basis to MVMD. We extend significant gratitude to Dr. John Clements for his immense contributions across our vaccine work.
Cold Chain / Vaccine Progress
Applying our Quicksome™ technology across an expanded variety of human and animal health vaccines is one of our top priorities for this year and we believe Dr. Norton’s extensive vaccine and research experience will be instrumental to continue the advancement of our important work.
Based on the cold chain technology achievements we announced last summer, we are nearing completion of our additional characterization studies with our proprietary Quicksome™ technology to optimize the application in the current Trivalent Inactivated Poliovirus Vaccine (tIPV) work and additional vaccines and proteins. We believe the technology would allow for long term stability and ease of global distribution, appropriate for pandemic preparedness, and other administration and distribution advantages, including potential sublingual applications that would eliminate the use of needles where desired.
We are currently in discussions with an animal husbandry health company in South America to evaluate where MVMD’s novel cold chain technology could be applied to certain animal vaccines to create a competitive distribution and storage advantage in warmer climates. The conversations are preliminary and are focused on initial protocols for identifying targeted husbandry vaccines and then applying our Quicksome™ and cold chain technologies for research and development. It is a very promising expansion of our development work.
