Lab Rats series: Cracking vaccines, biosecurity and personalized cancer with PopVax

PopVax recently took its first vaccine candidate—a fridge-stable, broad-spectrum covid vaccine that could help ease cold-chain concerns in developing countries—into human trials.SummaryLaunched in 2021 in the thick of the covid pandemic, the Hyderabad-based startup has an ambitious pipeline of first-in-class vaccines and drugs that it hopes to accelerate to clinics in the next two years.Gift this articleCheck your portfolioThis is a Mint Premium article gifted to you.Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.

Mumbai: PopVax’s Hyderabad lab hums with activity as about 100 computer scientists, molecular biologists, immunologists and engineers work on everything from computational design, machine learning and robotics to wet-lab testing of mRNA vaccines and even manufacturing clinical doses for testing.

mRNA vaccines instruct cells to make a harmless viral protein, training the immune system without injecting any form of the virus. Wet-lab testing involves researchers conducting physical experiments with a variety of substances.

PopVax recently took its first vaccine candidate—a fridge-stable, broad-spectrum covid vaccine that could help ease cold-chain concerns in developing countries—into human trials. It plans to make the vaccine open-source after phase 1 trials. “Our gift to the world,” said 30-year-old Soham Sankaran, founder and chief executive officer (CEO) of the biotech startup.

The five-year-old startup, which grew from two people in a 100 sq. ft shared lab at the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB) to its existing 10,000 sq. ft facility, is staring at a wide, ambitious pipeline of first-in-class drugs that it hopes to accelerate to clinical trials.

In drug development, phase 1 trials are focused primarily on establishing safety, tolerability and dose range in healthy volunteers, before they can progress to phase 2, tested in a larger group of patients to see how it works while still remaining safe.

Speed, talent and funding are key to progress in drug discovery but also among the most common hurdles an Indian biotech must contend with. Regulatory timelines are slow compared to global standards, attracting the best talent to India remains a challenge, and biotech funding in India has only just begun to sprout.

PopVax is conducting its first human trials in Australia because the clinical trial timelines there are much faster than in India. While getting approval for a phase 1 trial typically takes about 30 days in Australia, in India the timeline can stretch for months, requiring ethics committee approval and a test licence.

There has been an effort to address this through a 2026 amendment to the New Drugs and Clinical Trials (NDCT) Rules, 2019, which removes the need for test licences for certain drugs and halves the review and processing time. However, Sankaran emphasized the importance of time for a startup running on limited funding.

“It has taken us four years for us to build all this infrastructure. And subsequent programmes will be faster… We cannot wait; we will run out of money,” he said.

Sankaran, a computer scientist from Yale, was in India in the thick of the covid pandemic in 2021 and saw the scramble of an underprepared public healthcare system struggling to keep up with a rapidly evolving pathogen.

That’s where the idea for PopVax emerged—can we make next-generation vaccines in India for India and the world? After several rejections from domestic investors, PopVax was incubated at CCMB, and received $100,000 seed funding from the Gates Foundation as well as $20 million from the Ethereum cryptocurrency co-founder Vitalik Buterin’s Balvi fund for its covid candidate.

CCMB in Hyderabad functions under the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), an autonomous government body.

PopVax has seven vaccines in various stages of development, including one for hepatitis C and one for strep A.

PopVax is going beyond infectious disease with cancer immunotherapies.