When Israeli antibody therapy company BiondVax Pharmaceuticals (Nasdaq: BVXV) reported the failure of an advanced clinical trial in October 2020 of its flagship product, a universal flu vaccine, it seemed uncertain if the company had any future. The company’s market capitalization is down 86% from its peak of $600 million.
The company has a market capitalization of $4.6 million today, but its CEO Amir Reichmann, who has arrived with experience setting up vaccine factories and managing their supply chains for Novartis and GSK, thinks he can pull BiondVax out of the muck.
At the beginning of 2021, Reichmann told Globes that he wants to turn the BiondVax plant into a manufacturing plant for other companies. This coincided with the government’s plans to establish such a factory in Israel and managed to raise $12.8 million. However, in the meantime, the German biotechnology company BioNTech, which developed the Pfizer Covid vaccine, decided to set up a factory in Israel and it seems that the country is currently discouraging the establishment of another new vaccine factory.
Because of the new situation, Reichman changed the plan. He is now offering to use the plant to produce vaccines and any other biological products for Israeli start-ups conducting clinical trials. “In our factory, they can pay in shekels, speak Hebrew and qualify for innovation authority grant expenses,” explains Reichman, “and that while in Europe subcontractors to produce drugs for trials are busy with work, waiting times are long and there is priority for large companies, and prices are also high.” Reichmann is keen to run The factory quickly.”It costs me about 500,000 shekels a month to maintain it, not including equipment depreciation. We have to keep it running.”
His long-term plan is based on patented products that originally came from the Max Planck Institute: eight antibodies for autoimmune diseases such as psoriasis, arthritis, asthma and retinal degeneration. It is based on nanoscale antibody technology. “It’s like an antibody, but it’s not exactly an antibody,” says Reichmann. “With this technology, you can expose the animal to an antigen and allow it to produce a variety of antibodies against it, and then choose from it. And it clones the chosen antibody. The advantage of this technology is that You get a much smaller antibody, which leads to a lower immune response.
“Our product is produced in animals related to camels,” says Reichmann. “In our case that is alpaca. Ablynx, which was sold to Sanofi for $3.9 billion, produces antibodies in llamas, as does Moon Lake, which is trading for $2.5 billion.
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Reichman recounts that it was the founder of Ablynx who introduced him to the technology. “He ran a soccer team and my son played on his team, and then he said to me, ‘Bring on the boy, we’ll show you our llama farm.'” When Reichman was researching a new vaccine technology for BiondVax, he remembered this and found the technology at the Max Planck Institute.
The first product developed by BiondVax is for psoriasis, by injection into the lesion. The company hopes to capture market share in mild-to-moderate psoriasis, compared to Moon Lake, which produces antibody nanoparticles for severe psoriasis, which are administered systemically.
In the future, if there is success in this area, additional antibodies will be transferred from the Max Planck Institute, for example for asthma and inflammatory bowel diseases.
Within six months, the company hopes to start a clinical trial for psoriasis, about 18 months behind the big companies in the field, with the hope that Biondvax will actually succeed despite its meager resources in meeting deadlines.
Published by Globes, Israel business news – en.globes.co.il – on July 12, 2023.
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