The RNA Foundry
We’re excited to launch the RNA Foundry – RNAFoundry.com – a contract research, development, and manufacturing service for personalized cancer vaccines built on our mRNA-lipid nanoparticle platform.
Personalized RNA cancer vaccines have the potential to transform cancer care, but research, development, and manufacturing for these medicines is not widely available to those who need them the most.
At the RNA Foundry, we’re making these capabilities more broadly accessible using the same mRNA platform and fridge-stable lipid nanoparticle formulation we built for our own vaccines at PopVax, and our full-stack research, development, and manufacturing facility in Hyderabad, India, built to align with global Good Manufacturing Practices (GMP) for new medicines. This is the same facility where we manufactured our first mRNA vaccine candidate, which entered a Phase I clinical trial in Australia in August – we’ve dosed 24 participants, and there have been no serious adverse events (SAEs) so far.
The RNA Foundry is operated by our full-stack team of experts across computational vaccine design, molecular and cell biology, immunology, lipid nanoparticle formulation, analytical method development, GMP manufacturing, quality, and regulatory affairs. It can run 24/7 to produce personalized RNA vaccines.
We started this service because we’ve received numerous requests to produce personalized cancer vaccines. Merck and Moderna’s encouraging results with a combination of personalized mRNA vaccines and immune checkpoint inhibitors against melanoma, along with BioNTech and Genentech’s data against pancreatic cancer, suggest that RNA vaccines may become an important part of cancer care regimens across tumour types in the coming years, but regulatory approvals for many cancer types may come too late for many patients living with these diseases today.
In the meantime, these patients and their physicians are pursuing other pathways to access this class of medicine, including compassionate use and expanded-access INDs. Many have been inspired by pioneers like Sid Sijbrandij, the GitLab co-founder who has blazed a trail in personalized medicine, commissioning the development and manufacturing of many new therapeutics for his own cancer, including mRNA vaccines. The RNA Foundry is the first step in our quest to make this kind of personalized medicine available to all.
If you’re interested in personalized cancer vaccines, visit RNAFoundry.com or email us at cancer@rnafoundry.com.
Keep in mind that what we’re offering is not an approved medicine, nor are these vaccines a validated cure for any type of cancer. We are offering this as a bespoke design and manufacturing service to technically sophisticated patients and their physicians, and it is the physician who would recommend any potential use of the vaccine, as well as seek the necessary regulatory and ethical approvals to administer it to their patient.
An open source cancer vaccine for Yash
Our first project at the RNA Foundry is a vaccine for Yash Bindal, the 34 year-old pancreatic cancer patient we first wrote about in April.
Shortly after the birth of his daughter, Maya, Yash Bindal was diagnosed with stage 4 pancreatic cancer. At the RNA Foundry, we’re working with him and his family to develop a personalized mRNA cancer vaccine in the open.
With Yash’s consent, we’ve shared his tumour sequencing data and our vaccine design on GitHub so external experts can review our design and make their own contributions before we manufacture it at the RNA Foundry.
Read more at RNAFoundry.com/yash. Explore the data, code, and design on GitHub at github.com/popvax/yash. You can submit a proposed new design through a pull request or write to us directly at yash@rnafoundry.com.
Partner with us to design & manufacture a personalized cancer vaccine
If you’re looking for a contract research, development, and manufacturing partner for an mRNA cancer vaccine, we’d love to hear from you. We expect most projects to cost around $300,000 (USD) and take 8-10 weeks, depending on manufacturing slot availability. Please email the following information to cancer@rnafoundry.com:
Your name and the country you want the manufactured material to be shipped to
The cancer type and stage
A short description of any available tumour and healthy tissue sequencing data
We will get back to you quickly.
We’re hiring to support our work at the RNA Foundry – take a look at the open roles on our jobs page. If you don’t see a role that fits but think you could contribute, write to us at work [at] popvax [dot] com.
I’m Soham Sankaran, the founder & CEO of PopVax. Feel free to email soham [at] popvax [dot] com if you’re interested in discussing the challenges of rapidly turning machine intelligence into medicines.
Dhruv Arora, my chief of staff, made substantial contributions to the writing of this essay.
You can find me on Twitter/X @sohamsankaran. You can also follow PopVax on Twitter/X, LinkedIn, and YouTube, or email us at hello [at] popvax [dot] com.
