PopVax: Hyderabad mRNA startup takes covid vaccine to human trials
PopVax has taken its first vaccine candidate into human trials. The candidate is a fridge-stable, broad-spectrum covid vaccine that could help ease cold-chain concerns in developing countries, and the company plans to make it open-source after phase 1 trials.
The trials are being run in Australia, where phase 1 approval typically takes about 30 days. In India, the timeline can stretch for months, requiring ethics committee approval and a test licence.
PopVax is a Hyderabad-based biotech startup launched in 2021. It grew from two people in a 100 sq. ft shared lab at the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB) to a 10,000 sq. ft facility. About 100 computer scientists, molecular biologists, immunologists and engineers work there on computational design, machine learning, robotics and wet-lab testing of mRNA vaccines, as well as manufacturing clinical doses for testing.
Soham Sankaran, 30, is founder and chief executive. A computer scientist from Yale, he was in India during the covid pandemic in 2021 and saw an underprepared public healthcare system struggling to keep up with a rapidly evolving pathogen. After several rejections from domestic investors, PopVax was incubated at CCMB. It received $100,000 in seed funding from the Gates Foundation and $20 million from Vitalik Buterin's Balvi fund for its covid candidate.
To date, PopVax has raised over $30 million through research contracts and equity funding. It is preparing a new round in the coming months and is targeting a ticket size of at least $50 million.
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Sankaran called the open-source plan "Our gift to the world." On the pace of the work, he said: "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 described the company's wider ambition this way: "We view ourselves as sort of a transitional engine for turning machine intelligence into medicine."
Beyond the covid candidate, PopVax has seven vaccines in various stages of development, including one for hepatitis C and one for strep A. It is also working on first-in-class immunotherapies against liver cancer and pancreatic cancer, with plans to enter phase 1 clinical trials next year.
In June, PopVax announced the Immune Engine, a capability to design, test and manufacture targeted therapeutics against AI-designed viruses in weeks, not years, using generative AI and its own mRNA platform. The long-term plan is an AI-powered pipeline to deliver personalised medicines for each patient within weeks.
Speed, talent and funding are key to progress in drug discovery, and among the most common hurdles an Indian biotech must contend with. Regulatory timelines are slow compared with global standards, and a 2026 amendment to the New Drugs and Clinical Trials Rules, 2019 removes the need for test licences for certain drugs and halves review and processing time.
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