• Swindon & Wiltshire Innovation
• Wednesday May 13 2026

Bristol biotech firm leading fight against hantavirus

A Bristol biotech firm is leading the fight against hantavirus, with a vaccine in sight.

The dangerous virus has been making headlines after an outbreak on a cruise ship.

Hantaviruses are spread by rodents, and people can catch them through contact with infected droppings, urine or saliva. But a rarer strain is transmitted human-to-human.

They can cause severe respiratory illness, and there is still no specific antiviral treatment or widely available vaccine for most strains.

That has made the latest work from EnsiliTech, a company with roots at the University of Bath, especially timely.

EnsiliTech says it is developing a vaccine against Hantaan virus, a hantavirus strain associated with serious disease in parts of Asia and South America.

The company’s approach combines mRNA technology with its ensilication platform, a method designed to keep biological material stable at room temperature rather than dependent on deep-cold storage.

Cold storage is important because vaccines are often difficult to transport and store, especially in places without reliable refrigeration.

EnsiliTech says its silica-based protection system could make future vaccines easier to deploy, and the hantavirus project is one of the clearest tests yet of whether that idea can work in a real-world disease target.

The company says early laboratory and animal data have been encouraging, and the programme is moving towards first-in-human studies.

If the studies are successful, they could become both a potential defence against a serious virus and a showcase for a new way of making vaccines easier to store and ship, said the firm.