After getting off a meaty $120 million round in April, the height of the first wave of COVID-19 infections in the West, Affinivax is a clear indicator that infectious disease and vaccine work is here to stay.
Nearly doubling that already impressive B round, the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based biotech has nabbed $226 million, with goals of unseating Pfizer’s Prevnar franchise as well as pushing a set of vaccines for hospital-associated infections into the clinic.
Its lead program works as a Prevnar 13 challenger that covers 24 strains of pneumococcus and is fully financed by a partnership with Astellas, as the pair hopes to beat out Pfizer’s big-selling vaccine and its expanded 20-strain effort.
“We’ll take that $120 million and fund additional vaccines—we’re not stopping at 24, even though 24 already beats Prevnar 20,” Affinivax CEO Steve Brugger told Fierce Biotech back in April.
Affinivax’s pipeline is based on the multiple antigen-presenting system (MAPS), which allows the protein itself to induce an immune response, too. The new cash haul will be put toward its MAPS platform.
That $226 million, which in itself would have been an impressive sum for an already on-fire biotech IPO market, was co-led by new investors Rock Springs Capital and Foresite Capital.
Additional new investors included T. Rowe Price, Wellington Management, funds and accounts managed by Blackrock, Cormorant Asset Management, Perceptive Advisors, EcoR1 Capital, Surveyor Capital (a Citadel company) and Logos Capital. They were joined by existing investors Viking Global Investors, Bain Capital Life Sciences and Ziff Capital Healthcare Ventures.
Founded in 2014 with tech out of Boston Children’s Hospital, the company picked up its seed and series A financing from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. In 2017, it bagged another $10 million upfront when it licensed its lead program to Astellas, which will develop and commercialize the vaccine.
As Affinivax plugs away at its in-house pneumococcus efforts as well as a suite of programs targeting multiple hospital-associated infections, it is also doing early-stage work in cancer and exploring the use of its technology against viruses, including the new coronavirus behind the COVID-19 pandemic.