PopVax is an Indian full-stack biotechnology company developing novel mRNA vaccines and therapeutics using computational protein design. Since founding in late 2021, we have developed a novel mRNA architecture for immunogen display on virus-like particles (VLPs), a lipid nanoparticle (LNP) delivery platform for mRNA using PopVax-designed novel ionizable lipids, and a machine learning-enabled computational approach to protein design. Together with our small-scale GMP production facility and process for clinical dose production, these platforms collectively form the foundation of PopVax’s ability to rapidly take new mRNA biomedicines from concept to clinic. Our first candidate is an open-source next-generation 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.
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 early 2025, is intended to evaluate the safety and immunogenicity of the vaccine candidate in healthy human participants.
PopVax was founded by Soham Sankaran in Mumbai, and we were previously incubated at the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CSIR-CCMB). We are now a team of 70+ across our computational design, machine learning, molecular & cell biology, immunology, mRNA delivery, analytical method development, GMP production, quality, and regulatory teams, all of which are hiring. Our experimental work is based at the RNA Foundry, PopVax’s integrated R&D and GMP-capable clinical dose production facility in Hyderabad. Our work to date has been funded primarily via project agreements with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (see press release) and Vitalik Buterin's public health & biosecurity organization Balvi.
The name 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. Over the next decade, our mission is to develop and distribute vaccines that save one million lives each year across the world that would otherwise be lost to infectious diseases.
We work on three key types of vaccines:
1) 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.
2) 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 strategies have largely failed against 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.
3) 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.
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 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 also intend to be the first Indian company to take our own first-in-the-world vaccines to licensure in the US, allowing us to earn the scale of revenue needed to become the world’s leading engine for RNA biomedicine 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 Bangladesh. 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.
If you want to collaborate with us, partner with us, or invest in us, feel free to email us at contact [at] popvax [dot] com.
You can read more about what we do and why we do it over at our blog, The PopVax Chronicles, or listen to Soham explain why he founded the company in an episode of the Bretton Goods podcast. You can also follow us on X/Twitter at @PopVaxIndia.
Recent press releases:
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