Large Scale Synthesis of the Next Generation Synthetic Saponin Adjuvant TiterQuil

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Antitumor and anti-infectious disease vaccines require adjuvants in order to obtain optimal immunogenicity and therapeutic and protective efficacy. QS-21 is a natural saponin fraction that significantly out-performs other adjuvants in eliciting productive antibody and T-cell responses. It has remained the adjuvant of choice and has proven it's potency as immunological adjuvant in many cancer, infectious disease and degenerative disorder vaccine trials. Problems that havehampered the further development of QS-21 include adverse biological effects (that limit the tolerable dose), chemical instability, scarcity of the Quillaja saponaria tree (from which QS-21 is extracted) and variability of harvest yields from these trees.Recently, all of these liabilities have been overcome by our semisynthetic approach to QS-21 synthesis. This synthesis has also made molecular building blocks readily available for synthesis of modified and truncated QS-21 analogues. The replacement