UK – Baseimmune, a London, UK-based biotech company that uses proprietary, deep learning AI to predict future pathogen mutations to generate novel vaccines, raised £9M in Series A funding.
The round was led by MSD Global Health Innovation Fund and IQ Capital, with participation from existing investors including Hoxton Ventures, Creator Fund, Beast Ventures and Maki.vc.The company intends to use the funds to accelerate development of its three vaccine candidates currently in preclinical development for African swine fever, coronavirus, and malaria, to further advance its technology, expand its team, increase the number of programs in development and accelerate new vaccine programs.Founded in 2019 by Joshua Blight and Ariane Gomes, Baseimmune provides a vaccine design algorithm that crunches genomic, epidemiological, immunological, clinical and evolutionary data together to create entirely new synthetic antigenic proteins containing the parts of the pathogen that are most likely to evoke a protective immune response. The technology is based on a computational platform deciphering pathogen evolution to design cross-protective vaccines. By using big data and a design algorithm, Baseimmune has been able to shorten the time it takes to develop a vaccine candidate. The antigen designs can be fed into any vaccine technology platform, including mRNA, DNA and viral vectors, to create universal “future-proof” vaccines engineered to be effective against current and potentially emerging variants.29/02/2024
