Affini­vax CEO Steven Brug­ger hit the clin­ic a cou­ple years ago with an un­con­ven­tion­al take on a pneu­mo­coc­cal vac­cine de­signed to de­throne Pfiz­er’s Pre­vnar 13. And now that the can­di­date’s ready for Phase III, Brug­ger has reeled in a $226 mil­lion mega-round to see it through.

The Se­ries C comes sev­er­al months af­ter a $120 mil­lion raise, with Viking Glob­al In­vestors, Bain and Ziff Cap­i­tal Part­ners par­tic­i­pat­ing in both rounds. It’s quite the ac­com­plish­ment for a com­pa­ny that launched with $4 mil­lion in seed fund­ing from the Gates Foun­da­tion back in 2014.

Affini­vax is spread­ing the funds across its pipeline, which in­cludes its Astel­las-part­nered lead pro­gram for pneu­mo­coc­cal in­fec­tion. The can­di­date, which cov­ers 24 pneu­mo­coc­cal serotypes, is lin­ing up to ri­val Pfiz­er’s block­buster Pre­vnar 13, which bagged $6 bil­lion in rev­enue in 2019 — more than any oth­er ful­ly owned Pfiz­er prod­uct.

Affini­vax’s jab, dubbed ASP3772, re­cent­ly com­plet­ed a Phase II tri­al in adults 65 to 85 years old and is ready for a Phase III reg­is­tra­tional tri­al, al­though the com­pa­ny de­clined to com­ment on the time­line.

Brug­ger is af­ter what he calls a new class of vac­cines, us­ing the com­pa­ny’s MAPS tech­nol­o­gy, short for Mul­ti­ple Anti­gen Pre­sent­ing Sys­tem. It presents poly­sac­cha­ride and pro­tein anti­gens to the im­mune sys­tem to kick up both a B cell and T cell re­sponse. The plat­form fore­goes tra­di­tion­al con­ju­gate chem­istry al­to­geth­er in fa­vor of a bi­otin-rhiza­vidin bond, which Brug­ger com­pared to “the strongest Vel­cro you can imag­ine.”

“By not us­ing chem­i­cal con­ju­ga­tion, we be­lieve the im­muno­genic epi­topes on both the poly­sac­cha­rides and pro­teins are not com­pro­mised and re­tain their full im­muno­genic po­ten­tial,” Brug­ger said in an email. “The re­sult is quite dis­tinc­tive­ly dif­fer­ent than con­ju­gate vac­cines, where the poly­sac­cha­ride and the pro­teins are both rec­og­nized by the im­mune sys­tem.”

Affini­vax al­so has an on­go­ing Phase I tri­al in tod­dlers and plans to ini­ti­ate a Phase II proof-of-con­cept study in in­fants.

The Cam­bridge, MA-based biotech’s pre­clin­i­cal pipeline in­cludes can­di­dates for Staphy­lo­coc­cus au­reus, Kleb­siel­la pneu­mo­ni­ae and Pseudomonas aerug­i­nosa, Clostrid­i­um dif­fi­cile, and even Covid-19. Ac­cord­ing to Brug­ger, it’s now work­ing on a next-gen­er­a­tion pneu­mo vac­cine with broad­er cov­er­age than ASP3772.

“With the ad­di­tion­al cap­i­tal raised from the Se­ries C, we are in a po­si­tion to ad­vance these on our own to IND and clin­i­cal tri­als with­in the next few years,” Brug­ger said.

Last month, Pfiz­er got pri­or­i­ty re­view for its new pneu­mo­coc­cal vac­cine, 20vP­nC, which is de­signed to pro­tect against dif­fer­ent 20 strains of path­o­gen­ic pneu­mo­coc­cal bac­te­ria as op­posed to Pre­vnar’s 13. The FDA is set to de­liv­er a de­ci­sion by June 2021.

New data from HHS show that more than 162,000 courses of Pfizer’s Covid-19 antiviral Paxlovid were administered across the US over the past week, continuing a streak of increased usage of the pill, and signaling not only rising case numbers but more awareness of how to access it.

In comparison to this week, about 670,000 courses of the Pfizer pill have been administered across the first five months since Paxlovid has been on the US market, averaging about 33,000 courses administered per week in that time.

The FDA is offering more of an explanation of the guardrails around its program that may soon allow states to import prescription drugs in some select circumstances from Canada, but only if such imports will result in significant cost reductions for consumers.

While the agency has yet to sign off on any of the 5 state plans in the works so far, and PhRMA’s suit to block the Trump-era rule allowing such imports is stalled, the new Q&A guidance spells out the various restrictions that states will have to abide by, potentially signaling that a state approval is coming.

Leading the way to increase access to cheaper drugs worldwide, Pfizer said Wednesday it will provide all current and future patent-protected medicines and vaccines available in the US or EU on a not-for-profit basis to about 1.2 billion people in 45 lower-income countries.

Rwanda, Ghana, Malawi, Senegal and Uganda are the first five countries to sign on to this accord, which will also seek to blaze new paths for quick and efficient regulatory and procurement processes to reduce the usual delays in making new medicines and vaccines available in these countries.