Adjuvance
A Semi-Synthetic Best-in-Class Vaccine Adjuvant
Shingles is a painful disease that is estimated to afflict 1 in 3 adults over their lifetime. GSK has developed Shingrix into a $2b+ vaccine franchise, but its superior activity comes from the QS21 adjuvant, which is in extremely short supply due to its natural origin.
Adjuvance has developed a semi-synthetic process for mass-producing a superior version of QS21; this adjuvant is expected to enhance vaccines where efficacy is less than optimal.
ClearB Therapeutics
A Functional Cure for Hepatitis B
There are an estimated 250 million chronic carriers of Hepatitis B virus worldwide. Patients with this infection are at risk for liver cirrhosis, cancer, and death. However, a small subset of patients clear the infection spontaneously. ClearB analyzed the antibody repertoire of these patients and discovered epitopes that are strongly correlated with functional cure.
The company is developing a vaccine that would deliver these antigenic epitopes to non-cleared patients in order to stimulate a viral clearance like that seen in elite responders.
MeVox
Falling coverage, waning immunity, and non-vaccine genotypes have led to a resurgence in mumps and measles cases worldwide. The current MMR shot is a live viral vaccine, and thus performs poorly as a booster shot. MeVox is developing a stabilized measles and mumps booster shot that locks antigens in their most immunogenic conformations, eliciting a robust response from a durable booster shot.