PopVax updates – NIH NIAID will conduct the Phase I trial for our COVID-19 vaccine + Gates Foundation funding for our thermostable mRNA delivery work
We have some exciting news to share:
We’ve recently announced that PopVax has been selected for inclusion in the U.S. Government’s Project NextGen, an initiative to rapidly translate innovative new vaccines and therapeutics against COVID-19 and other public health threats from the lab into wide availability. As part of this initiative, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), will conduct and sponsor the Phase I first-in-human trial of PopVax’s open source next-generation COVID-19 vaccine candidate. 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 our vaccine candidate in healthy human participants. The development of this vaccine candidate has been funded largely by Vitalik Buterin’s Balvi Fund.
We’ve also announced $1.15 million in funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to develop thermostable lipid & polymer delivery formulations for mRNA vaccines. Existing mRNA vaccines require storage temperatures between -20 °C and -80 °C, which puts them out of reach of developing countries without extensive supply chains that are able to maintain those below-freezing temperatures. 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.
We are now 70+ people across our computational, experimental, analytical, process development, quality, and regulatory teams at the PopVax RNA Foundry, our integrated R&D and process development facility in Hyderabad. We have six novel vaccine candidates in our preclinical pipeline, and intend to initiate five clinical trials over the next two years. We’re actively hiring across all of those teams to support our new programs, so if you’re interested in working with us, take a look at our open job opportunities at jobs.popvax.com.
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Read more about our recent news here:
More information about the company can be found at our website, popvax.com.
