Baseimmune debuts with $11.3M and an algorithm to future proof vaccines

2024-02-26

疫苗

While the world learned in 2020 the importance of designing effective vaccines quickly, Baseimmune was a year ahead of the curve.

“I love vaccines because they’re the only method to eradicate diseases from the planet,” CEO Joshua Blight told FirstWord. “But we need to be smarter than the pathogen.”

He co-founded Baseimmune in 2019 with chief scientific officer Ariane Gomes after the pair met at the University of Oxford’s Jenner Institute, where they envisioned an evolution-informed method of creating vaccines. To put that vision into practice, they recruited the company’s third co-founder and chief technology officer Phillip Kemlo, a software engineer who built the company’s AI-driven vaccine design platform.

Now Baseimmune has raised a $11.3 million-series A on the strength of that platform and the three preclinical vaccines it has produced so far, including for coronavirus and malaria.

The company’s hybrid business model allows for internal asset development, with out-licensing the goal after each programme has been de-risked, as well as partnerships for vaccine development.

New investors MSD Global Health Innovation Fund and IQ Capital co-led Monday’s round, which saw participation from existing investors including Hoxton Ventures, Creator Fund, Beast Ventures and Maki.vc.

Preempting evolution

Baseimmune’s vaccine algorithm designs synthetic antigens that are capable of triggering a wide-ranging immune response against multiple facets of a pathogen, not just a single protein, as is the norm today. Plus, the company’s antigens take into account pathogenic aspects that don’t yet exist in nature – part of its goal to “future proof” vaccines against eventual mutations.

“Instead of just chasing the next mutation, the next variant, we’re trying to understand evolution, the evasion of pathogens, and build that into a vaccine,” Gomes told FirstWord.

The algorithm analyses genomic, epidemiological, immunological, clinical and evolutionary data to predict how a pathogen might evolve, which informs the design of each synthetic antigen.

Baseimmune isn’t just an AI company though, Blight emphasised. “We’re directed by science, but facilitated by technology,” he said. “Everything we’re doing computationally is validated in our lab.”

Proving its power

Baseimmune’s first three programmes were chosen to prove several points about the technology: its applicability to any kind of pathogen; its efficacy against relatively unknown targets; and its impact on public health.

That’s why, to showcase how the platform is universal, BaseImmune chose one human pathogen, one veterinary virus, and a parasite to initially develop vaccines against.

Malaria in particular is especially difficult to prevent, which makes it a great proof-of-concept for the algorithm, Blight said. The disease-causing parasite, which is more genetically complex than a typical virus, presents differently at each stage of its life cycle, and relies on mosquitoes to infect humans.

“One of the benefits of what our platform can do is that we can target a large number of [malaria] genes in one single antigen,” Blight said. “If you’re able to cover enough of these, then you can have a significant impact in preventing infection.”

African swine fever was also chosen because there isn’t a lot of existing experimental data for the virus. That contrasts sharply with vaccine development today, which often draws on a deep body of literature to decide which antigen is most likely to trigger a robust immune response – as was the case with COVID-19 vaccines COVID-19 vaccines, which all target the spike protein, thanks to years of research on coronaviruses showing the protein’s necessity to invade host cells.

With African swine fever, “we don’t have that world of resources in terms of research,” which may also be lacking for a pathogen that emerges in the future, Gomes said. “Our technology can bridge that knowledge gap by looking for rules that are common to all pathogens, like evolution and evasion.”

Finally, all three programmes are intended to address critical public health concerns. That’s why Baseimmune is targeting the entirety of the coronavirus family – like the common cold – with its vaccine, not just COVID-19.