# Verifiable Open Source Vaccines to Save Millions of Lives from the Developing World ... | Devcon SEA

- Channel: [Devcon](https://streameth.org/devcon)
- Date: 2025-10-07
- Duration: 16:54
- Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-c4upJlvW_fE
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4upJlvW_fE

## Description

Viruses & bacteria like HCV, Strep A, and TB cumulatively take millions of lives each year – effective vaccines against them would considerably reduce that death toll. Unfortunately, big pharma isn’t interested in investing in developing these vaccines, and even if they did exist, rising vaccine hesitancy may prevent many from benefitting. PopVax is pioneering a new model of developing first-in-the-world verifiable vaccines at dramatically lower cost in India with radically greater transparency.

Speaker(s): Soham Sankaran
Track: [CLS] d/acc Discovery Day: Building Towards a Resilient Utopia
Keywords: DeSci, Effective Altruism, Public good

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Devcon SEA was held in Bangkok, Thailand on Nov 12 - Nov 15, 2024.
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## Transcript

[Music] hey folks um I'm s sankran I'm the founder of a company called Popa which works on uh verifiable open source vaccines intended to save millions of lives from the developing World up and I'll explain what all of that means first let me say something that I think has unfortunately become controversial of recent times vaccines are one of the most effective Public Health interventions known to man over the last 50 years they are estimated and this is just childhood vaccines are estimated to have saved over 150 million lives across key pathogens that uh that attack uh younger Children and adolescents and when you add adult vaccinations they're uh likely tens of millions more but there are pathogens uh important pathogens that are quite prevalent for which there are no existing vaccines um these include uh tuberculosis uh Strep a and hcv in particular so just these three pathogens and here I'm talking about tuberculosis in adults not tuberculosis in children uh kill uh over 1.8 million people per year across the world and there are no effective vaccines for them today unfortunately instead of speeding up vaccine development is slowing down uh it it took uh the malaria vaccine which is one of the more recent infectious disease vaccines to be licensed 35 years to go from concept to lure um and uh these programs now routinely cost 1 billion plus dollars which is a a very large amount of money to invest in a in a single drug um and then because they're only dos let's say between one and three times usually unlike say gp1 Agonist like a zic which are which are dosed considerably more frequently uh farma companies do not see them as a particularly High return on investment and so they have pulled back especially in the postco era from investing in new infectious dis vaccine programs in particular for pathogens like TB which they see as being only relevant in developing countries which are poorer uh but there's a potential solution here so this is a a sort of graphic of the top 10 vaccine manufacturers in the world by volume in 2021 uh during covid but excluding the covid-19 vaccines and what you can see here is that Indian vaccine manufacturers including the serum Institute of India are very substantial in their presence they account for almost % of the volume of vaccine doses shipped globally um and so why don't we vac so to speak why don't we uh accelerate vaccine development by relying on uh this capacity that we have in India and other developing countries um and also the fact that you know you can do things cheaper in countries like India right we can do this we think 10x faster and 10x cheaper and you might ask why aren't people doing this already there are already these big vaccine companies in India surely they must be thinking on these uh lines um unfortunately India as a country spends almost nothing on research and development um it is a joke how little we spend on R&D across government uh and across Private Industry and Indian companies including vaccine companies are not particularly interested in taking technical risks uh such as developing new vaccines for pathogens where vaccines have been hard to develop um and so Popa is trying to solve this problem we are trying to solve long-standing problems in vaccine design including the three pathogens that I mentioned where people have made attempts but no success um using mRNA and computational protein design tools that have just reached the point where we can actually use them to make novel vaccines that couldn't have been made before as I'm sure many of you are aware uh Demis sabis John jumper um and David Baker just won the Nobel Prize in chemistry recently for their work in protein structure prediction and uh and protein design and so these tools are just now reaching the maturity where we can actually use them productively um and we want to leverage as I said the talent cost and speed advantages of operating in India which is to say uh you know we are the only company or one of the only companies doing this kind of Novel vaccine development in India and so the best talent in the country folks who want to work on these world uh changing problems but you know don't have the opportunity uh essentially come to us unfortunately no one wanted to fund Popa when I started this three years ago um VCS and nonprofits essentially didn't believe that the talent pool existed in India to do this um The Gates Foundation gave us an early 100K check um but that was not enough to build a vaccine platform or take anything to Clinic as I said these vaccine programs they routinely cost a billion dollars even if you can do it for 10x cheaper that's still hundreds of millions of dollars right um and uh we had some good early data about you know two and a half years ago uh but it had rendered both me and the company bankrupt uh then there was a massive pump in Shiba Inu coin which I'm given to understand is a mem coin of a mem coin um and vitalic founded the bio security and Public Health Organization baly uh and one of their Investments was us um and so they've now us accumulative 15 plus million dollar and I think it's it's interesting that it took uh vitalic somebody who is outside of the sort of General hierarchy of of you know Public Health funding to see what I think is obvious which is that the talent is there it was really a resource constraint that meant that folks in India had not had the opportunity to go after these problems so let me talk a bit about what we've actually done with that money and and what that means for the future so this is extremely dense and I apologize in advance but I'll explain what's going on here uh that green thing that you see there is the receptor binding domain or RBD of the SARS CO2 virus it is the immunodominant antigen of SARS CO2 antibodies against that particular protein are the key drivers of neutralization and protection in the covid vaccines so it's a subset of the spike protein that I'm sure all of you have heard of it's not the entire Spike it's just a part of it right what we've done is we've pioneered an approach where within mRNA we can encode uh a self assembling virus-like particle which is what is in the blue um that basically displays a whole bunch of copies of this RBD protein and in doing so we've achieved two things one is uh We've achieved considerably more potency so what that if you look at at our sort of uh highlighted you know bolded bar here two micrograms of our RBD vlp display mRNA which uses this approach provides 22x greater neutralizing antibody response which correlates quite highly with protection uh compared with two micrograms of the full Spike mRNA sequence from one of the US approved covid vaccines and this is all in mice uh and what's particularly interesting about this is you know we can use it to make a vaccine that's more potent we can also use it to make a vaccine that's potentially safer uh because we can achieve with 95% less dose as you can see at the top with just 0.1 micrograms we can achieve the same result as you would without using our strategy with 2 micrograms and so I can inject much less mRNA much less lipid nanoparticle and have potentially a much safer product overall and the kinds of things that Philip was talking about uh you know all get worse as you increase the dose of whatever your vaccine product or drug product is the other interesting thing that we got here is breath so uh if you think about covid-19 and why the vaccines were less effective as we got later into the pandemic the reason isn't that they they didn't have a durable response the reason is that the pathogen evolved uh variants of the path pen that were no longer susceptible to the antibodies El listed by the original vaccines became prevalent um and as a result of that we ended up with a situation where uh what were very effective vaccines at even preventing transmission became relatively ineffective as new variants evolved however using this mRNA encoded VP strategy what we've been able to do actually is elicit antibodies that neutralize a whole breadth of of variance so our uh construct is the red line which is able to potently neutralize you know even as it's diluted a whole bunch of these other V variants wild type gamma Lambda Omicron ba1 um whereas the the US approved CID vaccines the original ones in blue are not able to to neutralize those other variants so this approach which we are uh you know among the first to to Pioneer in uh in MRN protein design uh has potential substantial gains for covid and and for other pathogens like influenza now let me talk a little bit more broadly about what strategies like this are actually trying to do right if you think about any pathogen uh you know it has a whole bunch of antigens which are in the case of a virus those are going to be proteins um that elicit certain kinds of immune responses certain types of antibodies right uh and then some of those antibodies are going to be uh functional you know they they they they might sort of uh neutralize the pathogen right some of those antibodies are going to be non-functional they might bind but not neutralize or or not bind at all right and then within the context of of these functional uh antibodies there's some subset set of antibodies that you might consider broadly functional and what that means is even as the pathogen evolves even as there are additional variants that come up those antibodies which are some subset of the original antibodies remain effective so the intention of our vaccine design approach is basically to move the distribution of antibodies listed whether it's in an animal or a human towards these broadly functional antibodies which have a chance of providing durable protection against even new variants that might emerge um and this is relevant in the context of of Co for uh this variant evolution story uh in the case of some of the other pathogens that I mentioned for example hcv it is absolutely essential because hcv as a pathogen like HIV evolves within its own host and so you know if you were to be infected with hcv you might have thousands of different variants of the hcv pathogen within your own body and so uh an antibody response that is effective against just one of them is not going to be effective at clearing the pathogen uh so we've used this uh you know we've used a variant of of what's called an epitope scaffolding approach uh to basically attempt to elicit specific types of antibodies that provide this kind of broad functionality and Broad protection um and what we've been able to do in just three years uh is to run these processes of Designing and testing in animals uh these these novel immunogens which can elicit these antibodies uh much faster than anybody typically does in in vaccine R&D programs again as I said leveraging the fact that we can do this research much more cheaply and much more quickly in India uh and what we found is mRNA in particular gives us an advantage here uh mRNA is of course not the actual immunogen what you're injecting in mRNA is almost code that encodes a a specific design of immunogen that's intended to elicit some antibody response um and so because we're using mRNA which is a standardized process we can test thousands of different immunogens um and then when we allight upon one that that actually gives us the response we want we can translate it not just into a sort of lab environment but into an actual GMP manufacturing environment apologies uh we can translate not just into a lab environment but into an actual clinical environment into a into a clinical study very quickly which is not something that you can do with conventional vaccines as easily which is why you get these extremely long timelines right um and so what what we know so far is basically this vac approach in India it works right uh we've been able to do this uh at 20x cheaper than you would usually spend on a pre-clinical vaccine program to build a new platform and get to phase one uh We've 10x the testing througho of a normal vaccine program uh We've tested you know thousands and thousands of of novel l&p formulations of Novel designed immunogens which are basically vaccine designs we've tested them in vitro but we've also tested them in Vivo 500 plus and we've been able to achieve the results you saw in the beginning which is that our vaccine appears to be much much better than the existing covid-19 vaccines so what that means is I can take 10x the number of shots on goal for the same amount of funding as a company in Boston or San Francisco and potentially save 10x the number of lives in the long run right if somebody gives me $300 million a company in Boston and this is all based on a real comparison with a uh you know with a a biotech company that's developing vaccines and doing quite well doing so uh you know they might take uh one candidate to a through a phase one clinical trial and be getting ready for a phase two clinical trial with a new platform for us we've been able to build a new platform and with that amount of money with $300 million we would be able to take 10 new candidates to phase 1 and two and potentially bring multiple products to lure and again you know in the long run that saves a lot of lives right because every year we wait to develop these vaccines millions of people are dying um another key piece of this is that we've built our own GMP manufacturing facility so what that means is uh we have the ability within our own facility to make clinical doses uh in a way that's safe to inject in humans uh such that we can very quickly take these new candidates and Advance them to clinical studies and here I'll reference what Philip was talking about a little bit right I think it's critical to ensure uh that we build a process that is not only uh you know safe by the standards of existing regulatory Norms but is legible enough and is understandable by the general public that they trust what comes out of our work right um and so the good news here is and in fact I'll be I'm announcing this today we just announced it via press release this morning is that NAD which is part of the US National Institutes of Health has selected our next Generation covid-19 vaccine as part of the US government governs project NextGen for a phase one trial which will happen in the US early next year which to my knowledge is one of the first clinical trials of an Indian design vaccine in the US in fact no Indian vaccine or Indian design vaccine uh has ever been approved in the US no Indian company's vaccine has ever been approved in the US and Our intention is to to have our vaccines available all over the world right not just in rich countries not just in poor countries but but to everybody um and so this is very exciting news because I think what this means is our approach uh which as I said up top is an approach that at the beginning nobody supported right nobody believed that we had the talent India to do this nobody was certain you know or people in fact were quite certain that we wouldn't be able to do this right and it took an early bet from Gates and a substantial bet from vitalik and his team to support this has now been essentially co-signed by one of the most credible organizations in public has right so NAD thinks that this vaccine works very well um at least pre-clinically and they think it's worth evaluating in in humans uh the covid vaccines have you know have been somewhat maligned but best estimates suggest they saved tens of millions of lives we can quibble about specific numbers but it's it's likely a very large number right but again as Philip was talking about there's been there been a lot of questions about whether the process followed and approving these vaccines um you know were processes that are appropriate for human health um and at the same time you know on the other side of the coin the reality is that a lot of people who wanted these vaccines in developing countries didn't get them uh because fizer and Mna were not that interested in selling their vaccines at knockdown prices in poor countries right um and so what what we've done is we've worked with Bal to come up with a model um where we will be open sourcing our covid-19 vaccine we will not be enforcing our intellectual property on that vaccine uh for a number of years and what we'll be allowing people to do is to verify not just the R&D processes that led to That vaccine but also the manufacturing processes so that manufacturers across the rest of the world uh can not only make copies of this vaccine themselves they can distribute at low cost um but also that people can understand whether the processes that we've used in developing and Manufacturing this vaccine are compatible with what we say out in public um and are safe for them right they can have independent scientists evaluate these processes in a way that existing vaccine companies don't make enough information available to do um and that's something that we can do because we are comfortable releasing far more information than anybody has ever done um for a vaccine development or manufacturing program before let me just briefly talk about what we call the popac Million Lives Mission uh as I said there are these three pathogens that collectively kill 1.8 million plus people per year um we want to develop effective vaccines against all three of them that we think can save over a million lives per year um we want to do this using a new sustainable model for funding for public health vaccines similar to what we've done with vitalik and his team um where you know we will provide full details needed for vaccine verification R&D Improvement and Manufacturing openly we'll cap profits in developing countries and allow for open licensing on transparent terms of of this intellectual property um and we will have uncapped profits in rich countries right and this is a model that you know that we want to advance uh that we think could be the future of of sustainable vaccine development uh yeah I'm I'm happy to take your questions outside and please feel free to email me if you're interested in working with us funding us or collaborating with us thank you so much thank you so much that was