Rough­ly five months af­ter part­ner­ing with the Serum In­sti­tute of In­dia to de­vel­op Covid-19 vac­cines, Spy­Biotech is ready for its next big thing.

Su­mi Biswas

The British biotech pulled in a $32.5 mil­lion Se­ries A round last week, fun­nel­ing the suc­cess of its col­lab­o­ra­tion in­to a ven­ture-cap­i­tal raise. Spy­Biotech is plan­ning to de­vel­op its VLP vac­cine plat­form with the cash, but CEO Su­mi Biswas told End­points News that could go in any num­ber of di­rec­tions.

“Our plat­form is quite wide,” Biswas said. The plat­form tech “can be at­tached to lots of dif­fer­ent ar­eas and vac­cine de­liv­ery plat­forms.”

Spun out of Ox­ford back in 2017, Spy­Biotech launched from re­search in­to what they call a “su­per­glue” tech­nol­o­gy that showed promis­ing re­sults for a malar­ia vac­cine. The com­pa­ny’s plat­form us­es tech­nol­o­gy de­rived from the strep fam­i­ly of bac­te­ria, split­ting pro­teins in­to two parts — termed Spy­Catch­er and Spy­Tag. With each part re­tain­ing its at­trac­tive­ness, Spy­Biotech can es­sen­tial­ly plug and dis­play anti­gens on vac­cine de­liv­ery plat­forms like VLPs.

They got things rolling five months ago with the Serum In­sti­tute deal, mod­el­ing its Covid-19 shots off of the he­pati­tis B vac­cine by dis­play­ing the coro­n­avirus spike pro­tein. It’s an at­tempt to take ad­van­tage of the es­tab­lished safe­ty pro­file, Biswas said at the time.

But since launch­ing a Phase I/II study of their VLP vac­cine, Spy­Biotech has seen heavy in­vestor in­ter­est that helped lead to the Se­ries A. That will al­low Biswas and her team to build out the plat­form in oth­er ar­eas like on­col­o­gy.

“The su­per­glue tech­nol­o­gy is tai­lor made for plug-and-dis­play of anti­gens,” Biswas said.

Biswas isn’t look­ing right now at how long the cash will last the com­pa­ny, she added, and left the door open to an­oth­er raise some­time in the near fu­ture. The oth­er main goal, aside from de­vel­op­ing the plat­form, is to fund de­vel­op­ment of their lead pro­gram out­side Covid-19 — hu­man cy­tomegalovirus, or CMV.

The virus presents asymp­to­mati­cal­ly to most and is trans­mit­ted eas­i­ly through bod­i­ly flu­ids like sali­va, leav­ing it able to pass down con­gen­i­tal­ly with­out many par­ents aware they’re in­fect­ed. When it does pass down to chil­dren, there are sev­er­al com­pli­ca­tions that can oc­cur like child­hood hear­ing loss de­lays in neu­rode­vel­op­ment.

Right now Spy­Biotech is fo­cused on ramp­ing up man­u­fac­tur­ing, but Biswas hopes that one day a fi­nal prod­uct could be im­ple­ment­ed like the HPV vac­cine. The goal is to in­duce an­ti­bod­ies which could pre­vent in­fec­tion and trans­mis­sion from moth­er to ba­by.

Spy­Biotech plans to launch a Phase I tri­al of that can­di­date some­time in 2022, Biswas said.

New in­vestor Braavos In­vest­ment Ad­vis­ers led the round, with an­oth­er new in­vestor Ox­ford In­vest­ment Con­sul­tants chip­ping in. Found­ing in­vestors Ox­ford Sci­ences In­no­va­tion and GV al­so par­tic­i­pat­ed, along­side the UK Gov­ern­ment’s Fu­ture Fund.

The Endpoints News team is continuing to track IPO filings for 2021, and we’ve designed a new tracker page for the effort.

Check it out here: Biopharma IPOs 2021 from Endpoints News

You’ll be able to find all the biotechs that have filed and priced so far this year, sortable by quarter and listed by newest first. As of the time of publishing on Feb. 25, there have already been 16 biotechs debuting on Nasdaq so far this year, with an additional four having filed their S-1 paperwork.

Back in April 2018, just before Foresite Capital unveiled its $668 million Fund IV and a strategy to focus on tech-driven life science bets, one of its portfolio companies quietly made an announcement.

Fount Therapeutics, a drug discovery outfit backed by Foresite and Eshelman Ventures, had raised $22 million in Series A cash to hatch several fledgling spinouts. “The first ‘NewCo,’ Kinnate, will be focused on developing precision oncology treatments,” read a press release.

S&P Global has taken a look at the dominant forces shaping the pharma market and come to the conclusion that there will be more downgrades than upgrades in 2021 — the 8th straight year of steady decline.

But it’s not all bad news. Some things are looking up, and there’s still plenty of money to be made in an industry that enjoys a 30% to 40% profit margin, once you factor in steep R&D expenses.