PopVax 🇮🇳

PopVax is an Indian full-stack biotechnology company fighting infectious disease and cancer using machine learning-driven design and relentless empiricism.

We are developing first-in-the-world and best-in-class vaccines against infectious diseases like HCV, Strep A, TB, influenza, HPV, and COVID-19, as well as precision cancer immunotherapies against hard-to-treat solid tumours like liver cancer and pancreatic cancer.

PopVax's north star is our goal of developing novel vaccines and therapeutics over the next decade with the cumulative ability to save 1 million lives each year – the million lives mission.

Since our inception in late 2021, we’ve built an end-to-end platform to rapidly advance programmable medicines from concept to clinic: a machine learning feedback loop for generative protein design, a novel mRNA architecture for immunogen display, our own ionizable lipids and formulations for lipid nanoparticle delivery, and in-house fast-turnaround GMP production.

Our first program, an open-source broadly-protective COVID-19 vaccine funded by Vitalik Buterin's Balvi and the Gates Foundation, will begin a Phase I clinical trial in the US in mid-2026 conducted & sponsored by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH). We have also received funding from the US Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) and Renaissance Philanthrophy to develop our technology platform and our influenza, HCV, TB, and Strep A vaccines.

PopVax's R&D work is based at the RNA Foundry, our integrated R&D and GMP-capable clinical dose production facility in Hyderabad. We are now 80+ people across our computational design, machine learning, molecular & cell biology, immunology, nucleic acid delivery, analytical method development, GMP production, quality, and regulatory teams, all of which are hiring.

As frontier AI models begin to demonstrate capabilities that might enable prospective bioterrorists with no scientific background to design and produce novel viruses and bacteria as bioweapons, our full-stack approach to machine learning-enabled vaccine development at high speed is the foundation upon which we are building rapid response capabilities for the design and distributed manufacture of vaccines and anti-infectives against de novo pathogens to fortify global biosecurity.

We have also made substantial progress applying machine learning and high-throughput functional assays to the development of precision cancer immunotherapies against hard-to-treat solid tumours such as liver cancer and pancreatic cancer, which kill >80% of patients within 5 years of diagnosis.

We believe it is imperative that we have indigenous next-generation pharmaceutical technologies – our own research and development, not merely the means of production – in India and the rest of the developing world. It is a surprisingly little-known fact that despite India’s much-vaunted manufacturing capabilities, Indian pharma and biotech companies do almost no original research, choosing instead to pursue generics and biosimilars which, though lower in profit margin than original products, have a far lower failure rate and do not require expensive large-scale clinical trials to prove efficacy. Even when it comes to vaccines, where India is widely considered a global leader, our companies either use very old technology, produce copies of innovator vaccines once patents expire, or, in a few cases, licence products from Western companies and universities. While these companies have contributed massively to global public health by lowering the cost and increasing the supply of essential pharmaceutical products, they do not possess the capabilities or inclination to develop entirely new vaccines and therapeutics from scratch.

PopVax is different. Our R&D lab is in Hyderabad, not San Francisco or Boston, and our scientific work aims not just to be competitive with researchers and drug developers in those hallowed geographies, but to leapfrog them entirely. By leveraging the untapped scientific talent in India, and the significantly lower cost of operating here, we can take 10x more shots on goal per dollar of R&D funding than comparable companies and research labs in the US or Europe, and potentially save many more lives in the long run. We intend to be the first Indian company to take first-in-class biologics to licensure in the US, allowing us to earn the scale of revenue needed to become the world’s leading engine for programmable medicine development.

When we started this company, we were told by many international institutions and investors, as well as many Indian pharmaceutical executives, that we did not have the capability to do mRNA work of any kind in India. We have proved them wrong. We were told that Indians cannot be at the forefront of R&D on a new pharmaceutical platform, that we lack the talent and the rigour and the commitment. We have proved them wrong as well. We are now told that it is folly to imagine that we can leapfrog Merck and Pfizer and GSK, with their hundreds of billions of dollars and decades of dominance. We will prove them all wrong. Hyderabad will be the new global capital of the life sciences, and there will be a new dawn of pharmaceutical R&D across the rising world, from India to Nigeria to Thailand to Brazil. The solutions to the public health crises facing us will not be found in Boston, Geneva, Washington, or Paris, they will be found in Hyderabad and Cape Town and Rio and Bangkok. We do not need saving – we will do it ourselves.

You can read more about what we do and why we do it over at our blog, The PopVax Chronicles, and follow us on X/Twitter at @PopVaxIndia.