REDMOND, Wash.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Inventprise, a biotechnology company specializing in novel, affordable and highly impactful vaccines, announced today that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, a global non-profit organization, has made a program-related investment in the company’s continued development of IVT-25, an investigational pneumococcal conjugate vaccine designed to prevent pneumococcal bacterial infections. Pneumonia remains the single largest infectious cause of death in children worldwide. The investment, made by the foundation’s Strategic Investment Fund, will support development activities through completion of Phase 1 and Phase 2 clinical studies to assess safety and immunological proof-of-concept. The foundation will fund up to $90 million with the successful achievement of future manufacturing, preclinical and clinical development milestones.
IVT-25 is a 25 valent pneumococcal conjugate vaccine (PCV), designed to include the key strains that cause serious invasive disease in children, particularly in Africa and in other low- and middle-income countries. The investigational vaccine leverages Inventprise’s novel and proprietary linker platform technology which is designed to elicit significantly higher immune responses compared to existing technologies. The platform allows Inventprise vaccines to potentially increase the breadth of protection over that of current PCVs without compromising the immune response, a challenge not currently addressed by conventional technologies. Inventprise has generated pre-clinical data demonstrating superiority of IVT-25 compared to currently licensed vaccines in head-to-head studies. Inventprise expects to advance IVT-25 into first-in-human clinical trials in the second half of 2022.
The investment will support Inventprise’s goal to build a global PCV franchise. As part of its investment agreement with the foundation, Inventprise has committed to make IVT-25 available and accessible at an affordable price to low- and middle-income countries. In addition, the company has agreed to make its platform available for the development of future vaccines for global health.
“It is unacceptable that pneumonia remains the leading cause of death among children under the age of five,” said Keith Klugman, director of the Pneumonia program at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. “The scientific community must strive to develop more effective vaccines to protect the most vulnerable children from more strains of this devastating disease. The Gates Foundation is proud to support this bold undertaking which has strong potential to save the lives of millions of children in low-income settings.”
Subhash Kapre, Executive Chairman of Inventprise agrees, “Despite widespread PCV vaccination, considerable disease burden continues from pneumococcal serotypes not covered by the currently available vaccines, this is largely due to the genetic diversity of Streptococcus pneumoniae. High rates of morbidity and mortality due to pneumococcal disease underscore the need for a wider-spectrum vaccine especially in lower- and middle-income countries and ultimately for all populations globally. We are pleased to receive funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to achieve this goal.”
About Inventprise
Inventprise is a biopharmaceutical company leveraging its innovative platform technology to develop vaccines against infectious diseases, with an initial focus on invasive pneumococcal disease. Inventprise platform technologies are designed to enable high valent vaccines to induce broad, robust, and durable protection against pathogenic strains of infectious diseases. Inventprise has a robust pipeline of investigational vaccines including candidates to prevent human papilloma virus (HPV), group B streptococcus (GBS), meningococcus and severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). Inventprise was founded by Subhash Kapre, PhD in 2012 to advance novel, affordable and highly impactful vaccines through their proprietary technology, with the initial goal of providing lifesaving interventions to low and middle-income countries. Inventprise is located in Redmond, Washington. www.inventprise.com
