This seed funding will support proof-of-concept studies of the vaccine that will allow progress to pre-clinical development, scheduled for Q1/2021.The funds are provided by a private Swiss family office.
The availability of effective vaccines is seen as the ultimate solution for the global COVID-19 crisis. An ideal vaccine would be expected not only to prevent severe forms of COVID-19, but also to provide prophylaxis against the spread of the virus by inducing herd immunity in the population, necessary for the lifting of lockdown restrictions and for economic recovery. Such vaccines would have to be administered in mass scale and therefore have a very high safety profile.
CEBINA has designed a Coronavirus vaccine that is fundamentally different from the current vaccine efforts already in advanced stages. Current vaccine approaches are mainly based solely on the Spike (S) protein of SARS-CoV-2 and use novel technologies which have not been extensively tested for safety in human studies. CEBINA’s approach in contrast is based on a subunit, recombinant protein-based vaccine approach and designed to avoid the risk of inducing disease-enhancing antibodies.