OneVentures and University of Queensland commercialisation arm UniQuest have led a $34 million investment round for vaccine injection patch company Vaxxas.
New investors from the Vaxxas board and management team plus individual investors with significant medical device industry experience have also participated in the raise.
The new capital will help the company advance clinical programs, including its needle-free COVID-19 vaccine candidate, and install the first manufacturing lines at its Brisbane biomedical facility.
Vaxxas chief executive David Hoey said: “This financing from a strong syndicate of experienced life science investors reflects the significant potential of our considerable product pipeline and novel needle-free vaccination technology.”
He said the company was well positioned to advance multiple products towards commercial launch.
The new equity funding leverages non-dilutive grants of more than $100 million committed to Vaxxas by Australian and US government agencies, industry collaborators and global health organisations such as the World Health Organisation (WHO) and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Vaxxas was spun out of University of Queensland research in 2011.
The company’s injection patches each carry around 5,000 tiny spikes, invisible to the naked eye, which are coated in dry vaccine. When the spikes penetrate the skin they deliver vaccine to the layer of tissue just below which has a much higher proportion of immune cells than the deeper tissue reached by conventional hyperdermic needles. This should make them effective at lower doses. As dry vaccines do not require low temperature storage, their use should ensure vaccines can be delivered to areas with limited resources. The patches also do not need medical supervision to be applied and can be self-administered.
Vaxxas is currently carrying out human clinical trials for delivering COVID-19, rubella and measles vaccines with the patch technology.
Image: The Vaxxas patch and its delivery device.