photo by: Journal-World file photo

The Bioscience and Technology Business Center is shown in this Journal-World file photo from 2014.

A Lawrence bioscience company has received hundreds of thousands of dollars in government funding for research into a COVID-19 vaccine — and could get millions more — and a local farm also has a federal contract for virus relief efforts.

Separate from economic relief legislation, the federal government has spent nearly $15 billion on myriad efforts to combat the COVID-19 pandemic so far. And about $650,000 of that has gone to ViroVax, a start-up company housed in the University of Kansas’ Bioscience & Technology Business Center.

ViroVax was recently awarded a contract up to $8.75 million for the development of a COVID-19 vaccine, and that $650,000 figure is what it’s already received in reimbursement costs for the initial stages of research.

The Journal-World discovered the contract through an examination of a database of federal COVID-19 spending compiled by ProPublica, a nonprofit investigative journalism outlet.

Dr. Sunil David founded ViroVax in April 2019, he told the Journal-World. David was a professor at KU for a decade before taking a job at the University of Minnesota in 2015. But after a while, David said he started wanting to come back.

“I missed Kansas, and the Kansans, more to the point,” he said.

Before COVID-19, David and ViroVax focused primarily on vaccines and the properties of vaccines that speed up the body’s immune response to a virus — called adjuvants — for illnesses like West Nile virus and Zika.

“But we also took on the COVID-19 vaccine when it became a problem,” David said. “That is the primary focus, although we’re also working on developing drugs for treating COVID-19.”

The progress David had made with a vaccine for the Zika virus was likely what helped him and ViroVax land the current contract, he said. They were able to show that the vaccine for Zika had strong immunity properties and could use antibodies to fight the virus.

“That was a significant step forward,” he said.

ViroVax’s strategy in developing a COVID-19 vaccine is very similar, David said. It uses what’s called a subunit vaccine to target the new virus — meaning it uses an antigen, or antibody creator, to target the part of the virus that invades healthy cells.

The particular antigen ViroVax has focused on is also found in E. coli bacteria, David said, and the initial results have been promising.

“We are seeing immune responses,” he said. “They’re a little weak at the moment, but we’re refining the antigens and we should know in a few weeks’ time whether the new antigens allow the generation of a more robust immune response.”

David said he couldn’t speak to a reasonable timeline for a COVID-19 vaccine to be readily available, but that his focus was on developing the one ViroVax has been contracted to research.

KU will not recoup any costs from the federal contract even though the BTBC hosts ViroVax. KU spokeswoman Erinn Barcomb-Peterson said she didn’t have any information about ViroVax and that not every tenant in the BTBC has a direct connection to KU. Adam Courtney, the vice president of finance for the BTBC, confirmed that ViroVax is simply a tenant company in the complex and pays rent for its lab spaces.

ViroVax is not the only Lawrence-area company to receive a federal government contract related to COVID-19. Records show that Juniper Hill Farms in north Lawrence received a $90,000 contract in May for a shipment of fruits and vegetables.

The contract was awarded by the United States Department of Agriculture, but few other details were publicly available about what exactly the fruits and vegetables were commissioned for.

Juniper Hill Farms President Scott Thellman told the Journal-World the contract is to provide 5,000 boxes of produce to area nonprofits and food banks as part of the USDA Farmers to Families Food Box Program.

So far, Thellman said, Juniper Hill has distributed 2,750 boxes of produce to Just Food, the Douglas County food bank. The contract is currently set to expire at the end of June, but Thellman said it could be extended further.

“We anticipate being (able) to open up our distribution beyond Just Food to serve additional non profits and food banks in our community and across the region,” he said in an email.

As of the most recent available data, provided Friday by the Kansas Department of Health and Environment, COVID-19 has infected 10,393 Kansans and killed 232. Nationwide, there are over 1.88 million confirmed COVID-19 cases, and nearly 109,000 Americans have died from the respiratory virus.