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.

www.adjuvancetechnologies.com

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.

Scalable mRNA Vaccines

Production of quality RNA for vaccines and antibodies has historically been an issue to unlocking its potential to control the synthesis of proteins. Creating quality RNA is expensive and time consuming, making production difficult to scale.

Greenlight’s mRNA biomanufacturing platform aims to create quality mRNA quickly. An end-to-end, self-contained process enables cost-efficient production of mRNA vaccines and antibody therapies when compared to traditional production processes. Greenlight is developing vaccines for flu and Covid-19 using their scalable platform.