Vaccines at PopVax

PopVax is a portmanteau of the phrase population-scale vaccines. It represents our commitment to building a platform for cutting-edge vaccine development and production whose benefits are available at the same time to the entire global population, rather than just people lucky enough to live in rich countries, in order to accomplish our Million Lives Mission to save 1 million lives each year with the medicines we develop over the next decade.

We combine machine learning methods for computational protein design with high-throughput immunology experimentation to develop first-in-the-world vaccines.

Vaccines are one of the most successful public health interventions known to man. They’ve saved millions of lives per year over the past century, and wide deployment of recently-developed vaccines such as RTS,S and R21/Matrix M against malaria is on track to save millions more in this decade alone. The COVID-19 vaccines are estimated to have saved as many as 20 million lives during the acute phase of the pandemic, and if a broadly-protective betacoronavirus vaccine had been available prior to 2020, then perhaps the deaths and damaging disruptions of our recent pandemic era would never have happened in the first place.

But vaccine development is slowing down. In the glorious 1960s-1980s heyday of 20th century vaccinology, a team led by Merck’s legendary Maurice Hilleman developed and brought to licensure vaccines against measles, mumps, rubella, hepatitis A, hepatitis B, chickenpox, meningitis, pneumonia, and Haemophilus influenzae, versions of which are still in use across the world today. Hilleman famously used a sample of mumps from his own daughter, Jeryl Lyn, to bring to market a vaccine against that pathogen in just four years – that was the fastest timeline from initial development to approval of a vaccine ever in the U.S. until the Moderna and BioNTech-Pfizer COVID-19 vaccines. More recently, the malaria vaccines took 35 years to achieve licensure, and researchers have worked for decades on vaccines for HIV, adult pulmonary TB, and HSV (herpes) without a single one being approved.

PopVax was founded based on our belief that new machine learning methods for computational protein design combined with high-throughput immunology experimentation in the wet lab would unlock the door to developing effective vaccines against pathogens that current vaccine design methods have failed against.

We work on three key types of vaccines:

First, broadly-protective vaccines that can each protect against a group of related high-risk pathogens, such as the the many strains of Influenza that have tormented us for thousands of years, as well as the betacoronavirus genus that gave humanity the gift of the original SARS-CoV virus, SARS-CoV-2 of COVID-19 fame, and the deadly MERS-CoV. We believe that making these broadly-protective vaccines today is our best shot at preventing future pandemics which, as we’ve all just experienced, could cost millions of lives in an instant.

Our first program, which we're using to demonstrate our technology platform, is a COVID-19 vaccine intended to broaden protection against both current and predicted future SARS-CoV-2 variants, reducing the possibility of a new mutation in the virus suddenly causing another massive wave of infection. In preclinical studies, our COVID-19 vaccine designs elicit 10-100x more potent antibody responses against key SARS-CoV-2 variants than the sequences of the existing US-approved mRNA vaccines. This vaccine program was funded largely by Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin's Balvi Fund, and we've made a commitment to make it open source for anyone to manufacture and build on, in line with Vitalik's d/acc philosophy, which we also broadly share.

On the basis of strong preclinical data, PopVax's COVID-19 vaccine has been selected for inclusion in the US Government’s Project NextGen, as part of which the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), will conduct and sponsor a Phase I first-in-human trial of the vaccine candidate (see press release). This trial, which will be conducted in the United States and is expected to begin in mid-2026, is intended to evaluate the safety and immunogenicity of our vaccine candidate in healthy human participants.

We are using a similar approach to develop a broadly-protective influenza vaccine. In January 2025, PopVax was announced as one of the winners of the first stage of the US Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) Patch Forward Prize for our influenza vaccine candidate based on very promising preclinical data, as part of which we have been awarded $2M by the US Government, along with our partner LTS Lohmann, to develop a self-administered patch-delivered version of this vaccine – here's BARDA's press release and our press release about that.

Second, vaccines against diseases such as Adult Pulmonary Tuberculosis, Hepatitis C, and Strep A, that are among the leading global drivers of mortality and morbidity, and against which there are no effective vaccines. These three diseases and their downstream complications alone cause more than 2 million deaths each year across the world, and existing vaccine design approaches haven't been able to tackle them. We believe that our ability to combine emerging methods in computational protein design and high-throughput immunology experimentation in the wet lab gives us a fighting chance to solve these longstanding design challenges once and for all.

Third, vaccines against ubiquitous pathogens that cause chronic infections in most of the human population, often lying latent for decades without substantial symptoms. These may seem innocuous – if everyone has them, how much harm could they possibly do? – but the discovery that HPV causes almost all cervical cancer, which kills hundreds of thousands of women each year across the world, and the emerging consensus that multiple sclerosis (MS) is caused by the Epstein–Barr virus (EBV), better known for causing mononucleosis in teenagers, have demonstrated that the long-term consequences of infection by these pathogens can be dire. Most of these pathogens do not yet have any approved vaccines, and many of them have no curative treatment available – once you’re infected, you’re infected for life. We believe that yet more serious long-term sequelae of these infections will emerge, including cancers, organ damage, and neurological diseases, and that a greater fraction of life-threatening degenerative conditions than most people expect will be found to be downstream of latent infection.

If you want to help shepherd humanity into our glorious future in which no man, woman, or child need fear infectious diseases, join us!

If you're interested in collaborating with us on our vaccine programs, email vaccines [at] popvax.com