PopVax Announces 1.15 Million USD in Funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation for Thermostable mRNA Delivery Formulation Development

Business Wire IndiaPopVax, an Indian full-stack biotechnology company developing novel mRNA vaccines and therapeutics using computational protein design, is pleased to announce that its ongoing research effort to develop lipid-polymer delivery formulations for thermostable mRNA vaccines has been funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation under a 1.15 million USD project agreement signed in October 2023. This effort follows on from a prior 2021 project agreement under which PopVax was awarded 100,000 USD to support the company’s earliest exploratory work on mRNA platform development and thermostable mRNA delivery formulations. These formulations are composed of novel lipids and polymers designed by PopVax. In September 2024, PopVax initiated the first animal study to determine the efficacy of a formulation from this project.

The Principal Investigator for this project is Dr. Maunish Barvalia, PopVax’s Vice President of Platform Technologies, who previously worked with pioneering nucleic acid delivery research groups at NanoVation Therapeutics and during his PhD at the University of British Columbia in Canada.

“We at PopVax are delighted to receive support to develop novel thermostable delivery formulations for mRNA-based vaccines and therapeutics, a critical challenge that is central to our public health mission. During the COVID-19 pandemic, mRNA vaccines were designed against the novel pathogen in three days, entered clinical trials less than two months from conception, and were able to scale to billions of manufactured doses in just one year. This speed, enabled by the flexibility of mRNA technology, was critical at a time when just days of delays meant potentially thousands of lives lost. The mRNA vaccines approved in the United States and Europe, however, required storage temperatures between -20 °C and -80 °C, which put them out of reach of developing countries without extensive supply chains that are able to maintain those below-freezing temperatures,” said Soham Sankaran, Founder & Managing Director of PopVax. “The delivery formulations we are developing as part of this project are intended to be stable at normal refrigerator temperatures while retaining their potency across a range of routes of administration. This will enable rapid, population-scale distribution of new mRNA vaccines and therapeutics to combat infectious disease in developing countries – both potential future pandemics and the deadly pathogens already among us.”

PopVax (https://popvax.com) has 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 the company’s GMP-ready infrastructure 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.

Founded in late 2021, and previously incubated at the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CSIR-CCMB), PopVax now employs 70 people across its computational, experimental, analytical, process development, and quality teams at the RNA Foundry, its integrated R&D and process development facility in Hyderabad.

PopVax’s first program is focused on the development of a broadly-protective next-generation COVID-19 vaccine covering both present and predicted future variants of SARS-CoV-2. This vaccine candidate is expected to enter human clinical trials in the United States of America in early 2025. PopVax has six novel vaccine candidates in its preclinical pipeline, and expects to initiate five clinical trials over the next two years.

Inquiries can be directed to [email protected].