PayPal co-founder and Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel's investment firm plans to make a “multimillion-dollar” investment in Springfield-based Rational Vaccines to expand and speed up overseas testing of the company’s genital herpes vaccines, the company’s CEO says.

“They’re the perfect partner for us,” said Agustin Fernandez III, chief executive officer of Rational Vaccines, the company he started in 2015 with William Halford, a Southern Illinois University School of Medicine researcher.

Halford’s work in his laboratory at the Springfield-based medical school formed the foundation for the work of Rational Vaccines, a privately held company that uses a live but weakened form of the herpes virus to treat one of the world’s most common sexually transmitted infections.

Frustrated by resistance in the U.S. scientific community to a vaccine based on a live “attenuated” virus — even though vaccines for measles, mumps and chickenpox all use attenuated viruses — Halford has said he will prove the effectiveness of his discoveries overseas and hopes that the benefits patients receive there eventually convince the Food and Drug Administration to give Americans access.

Dr. Jason Camm, chief medical officer of Thiel Capital, the San Francisco-based investment firm founded by Thiel, is expected to formally announce the partnership at a news conference Thursday in Springfield.

Camm and others at Thiel Capital didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Halford, 48, a Springfield resident and chief science officer of Rational Vaccines, is dealing with terminal cancer and has been unavailable for comment, SIU officials said.

“The vaccines that Dr. Halford has developed show promise to dramatically improve the health of the public and relieve suffering from herpes infections for millions of people,” Dr. Jerry Kruse, dean and provost of SIU School of Medicine, said in a statement.

“The investment by Thiel Capital is a big step forward in making Dr. Halford’s dream a reality,” Kruse said.

'Mission-oriented'

Fernandez, 41, a movie producer and director who lives in Los Angeles and New York, said he was introduced to Thiel Capital officials by a friend who is close to Thiel, Facebook’s first professional investor. Thiel, 49, whose net worth is listed at $2.7 billion by Forbes, expressed interest in Rational Vaccine’s work, according to Fernandez.

Halford and Fernandez have traveled to San Francisco and talked with Camm and others at Thiel Capital for the past six months, Fernandez said.

“It’s a rigorous due diligence process,” he said.

Negotiations with Thiel Capital are almost complete, Fernandez said, but he wouldn’t release the specific amount of the investment until everything is finalized over the next few weeks.

“We just felt that Thiel Capital were the right partners,” Fernandez said. “It wasn’t about the money. It’s the fact that they’re mission-oriented, and they believe in the science. … They’re very focused to make the world better.”

Up to this point, Halford, Fernandez and their friends and family members have invested a total of about $1.2 million in Rational Vaccines. That money allowed the company to set up a lab in a downtown Springfield office building and conduct a phase 1 clinical study last year in the Federation of Saint Kitts and Nevis, a two-island nation in the Caribbean.

The money and expertise from Thiel Capital, Fernandez said, is “going to allow us to move forward … at maybe a thousand-times-quicker pace than we were doing on our own. This partnership expands the network exponentially and expands our ability to do better science exponentially.”

Rational Vaccines is working with officials in Mexico and unnamed Caribbean nations to conduct another phase 1 trial of the treatment vaccine Theravax, involving 20 to 25 patients, as well as phase 2 trial of Theravax involving more than 200 patients, Fernandez said.

The trials — which will continue to test the vaccine’s safety and begin to evaluate effectiveness — will be conducted in late 2017 or early 2018, he said, adding that the company also is working with a foreign nation he wouldn’t name to offer Theravax to the general population of herpes sufferers.

None of Halford’s vaccines has been evaluated in the “gold standard” of testing — large-scale, multi-site trials involving thousands of patients and the use of both placebos and real medicine.

Halford, a native of New Orleans who holds a doctorate degree in viral immunology from Louisiana State University, is working to get results of the first clinical trial published in a scientific journal, Fernandez said.

At the pinnacle

Halford has said that his research in mice showed results 100 times better than the failed genital herpes vaccine developed by GlaxoSmithKline using pieces of protein, or subunit, from a virus. Trials of the GlaxoSmithKline vaccine cost the federal government more than $27 million between 2003 and 2009.

SIU officials praised Halford, an SIU faculty member since 2007, for the expected Thiel Capital partnership and clinical results thus far. Halford previously worked at Montana State University and Tulane University School of Medicine and has researched the herpes simplex virus since 1992.

Donald Torry, SIU’s interim associate dean for research, said in a statement: “Few scientists get to the pinnacle where Dr. Halford is today. Discovery research is often about placing individual pieces into a sometimes very big puzzle. Few scientists will get to see their completed puzzle, but I believe all scientists are compelled by their convictions that adding their pieces will someday significantly benefit society.”

SIU is co-owner of one issued patent and the sole owner of two pending patents in connection with Halford’s research on vaccines, according to Robert Patino, the SIU system’s director of technology transfer. Any royalties earned through patents will be equally shared between SIU and Halford, Patino said.

'A normal life'

Richard Mancuso, 48, of Brick, New Jersey, said he was one of the 17 herpes patients who received the three-shot vaccine series of Theravax after flying to Saint Kitts and Nevis in April, May and June of 2016.

All 17 patients reported more benefits from the vaccine than the antivirals they had taken in the past, according to Rational Vaccines. And on average, patients reported a three-fold reduction in the days in which they felt herpes symptoms.

Mancuso said he experienced a two-thirds reduction in herpes symptoms. He used to go through two to three outbreaks each month, with sores on his genitals and face.

Mancuso said he has worked as a truck driver and pest exterminator and dealt with herpes for 25 years.

“It’s probably the No. 1 reason I’m still single,” he said.

Since the inoculations, his outbreaks are less frequent and not painful, he said, adding that he hasn’t had any side effects from the treatment.

“It’s pretty damn good compared to where I was before,” he said. “Having the potential for a normal life is much better.”

Mancuso said he is willing to talk with others about his experience with the treatment and can be reached at itsnotatumor@icloud.com. His Twitter handle is @RationalVaxxer.

Mancuso said he has talked with herpes sufferers who have contemplated suicide because of the social isolation, pain and dread that the condition can bring.

He said he was lucky to be part of the trial.

“I’m pretty happy to be part of something a lot bigger than myself,” he said. “There is a therapeutic cure, and it works. I think that changes everything.”

— Contact Dean Olsen: dean.olsen@sj-r.com, 788-1543, twitter.com/DeanOlsenSJR.

***

Herpes facts

* In the United States, one in seven people ages 14 to 49, or more than 23 million people, have genital herpes. As many as 3 million of them suffer herpes outbreaks, which can include painful blisters, four to 24 times per year.

* More than 400 million people worldwide have genital herpes, with tens of millions living with chronic symptoms, including chronic pain, that often aren’t alleviated with available medical treatments such as anti-viral medications.

*The global market for treatments to reduce the severity of herpes symptoms will reach $4.8 billion annually this year, according to Global Industry Analysts Inc. Rational Vaccine’s treatment for herpes sufferers is called Theravax.

* SIU School of Medicine says Theravax works by using a live attenuated virus that slows the replication process of genital herpes, allowing the immune system to better control the disease.

* The global market for Rational Vaccines’ preventive vaccine, Profavax, could be more than $10 billion per year, according to SIU researcher William Halford.