$34m raised for needle-free vaccine patch

Vaxxas, a clinical-stage biotechnology company commercialising a novel vaccination platform, has completed a financing round which raised US$23 million (AU$34 million) in new funds.

Proceeds from the financing will be used to advance Vaxxas’s clinical programs, including the company’s needle-free COVID-19 vaccine candidate and installation of the company’s first manufacturing lines with capacity to support its first products through late-stage clinical studies as well as early commercial production. The company is building a clinical pipeline based on its novel HD-MAP (High Density Microarray Patch) vaccination platform.

Dr Paul Kelly, Founding Partner and Head of Healthcare at OneVentures, said, “Vaxxas’s needle-free vaccination technology has shown in preclinical and clinical studies to have the potential to improve the availability and efficacy of vaccines for a range of serious and prevalent diseases, including COVID-19 and influenza.”

With the HD-MAP platform, dry-coated vaccine is delivered directly to the immune-rich epidermis and upper dermal layers of the skin, while simultaneously causing localised cell death and inflammation, both of which serve to enhance vaccine-induced immunity. The benefits of this delivery method include the reduced need for refrigeration, broader accessibility and the potential to be self-administered by individuals who are not trained health professionals.

The financing will accelerate the clinical program for Vaxxas’s COVID-19 vaccine patch candidate which is currently in Phase I clinical trials and is based on the company’s proprietary HD-MAP delivery of University of Texas at Austin’s (UTA) COVID-19 vaccine candidate. Results from preclinical animal studies conducted in collaboration with the University of Queensland and published in Science Advances showed the potential efficacy of this COVID-19 vaccine patch against all currently known variants of concern.

David Hoey, CEO of Vaxxas, said, “We are well positioned to advance multiple product opportunities toward commercial launch. In the near-term, we will continue to advance our lead COVID-19 vaccine program along with other clinical initiatives, and execute our go-to-market strategy of building commercial-scale manufacturing capacity and high-throughput production lines.”

This investment round was led by existing investors OneVentures and UniQuest Pty Ltd. New investors include members of the Vaxxas Board of Directors, management team and a number of individual investors.

The AU$34 million in new funding will leverage non-dilutive financial support of more than AU$100 million which has been provided and committed to Vaxxas under contracts with US and Australian government agencies, including the US Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), industry collaborators and global health organisations, including the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

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