Lab Rats series: Cracking vaccines, biosecurity and personalized cancer with PopVax

Mumbai: PopVax’s Hyderabad lab hums with activity as about 100 computer scientists, molecular biologists, immunologists and engineers work on everything from computational design, machine learning and robotics to wet-lab testing of mRNA vaccines and even manufacturing clinical doses for testing.

mRNA vaccines instruct cells to make a harmless viral protein, training the immune system without injecting any form of the virus. Wet-lab testing involves researchers conducting physical experiments with a variety of substances.

PopVax recently took its first vaccine candidate—a fridge-stable, broad-spectrum covid vaccine that could help ease cold-chain concerns in developing countries—into human trials. It plans to make the vaccine open-source after phase 1 trials. “Our gift to the world,” said 30-year-old Soham Sankaran, founder and chief executive officer (CEO) of the biotech startup.

The five-year-old startup, which grew from two people in a 100 sq. ft shared lab at the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB) to its existing 10,000 sq. ft facility, is staring at a wide, ambitious pipeline of first-in-class drugs that it hopes to accelerate to clinical trials.

In drug development, phase 1 trials are focused primarily on establishing safety, tolerability and dose range in healthy volunteers, before they can progress to phase 2, tested in a larger group of patients to see how it works while still remaining safe.

Speed, talent and funding are key to progress in drug discovery but also among the most common hurdles an Indian biotech must contend with. Regulatory timelines are slow compared to global standards, attracting the best talent to India remains a challenge, and biotech funding in India has only just begun to sprout.

PopVax is conducting its first human trials in Australia because the clinical trial timelines there are much faster than in India. While getting approval for a phase 1 trial typically takes about 30 days in Australia, in India the timeline can stretch for months, requiring ethics committee approval and a test licence.

There has been an effort to address this through a 2026 amendment to the New Drugs and Clinical Trials (NDCT) Rules, 2019, which removes the need for test licences for certain drugs and halves the review and processing time. However, Sankaran emphasized the importance of time for a startup running on limited funding.

“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 said.

The pipeline

Sankaran, a computer scientist from Yale, was in India in the thick of the covid pandemic in 2021 and saw the scramble of an underprepared public healthcare system struggling to keep up with a rapidly evolving pathogen.

That’s where the idea for PopVax emerged—can we make next-generation vaccines in India for India and the world? After several rejections from domestic investors, PopVax was incubated at CCMB, and received $100,000 seed funding from the Gates Foundation as well as $20 million from the Ethereum cryptocurrency co-founder Vitalik Buterin’s Balvi fund for its covid candidate.

CCMB in Hyderabad functions under the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), an autonomous government body.

PopVax has seven vaccines in various stages of development, including one for hepatitis C and one for strep A.

PopVax is going beyond infectious disease with cancer immunotherapies.

The startup is working on multiple first-in-class immunotherapies against liver cancer (hepatocellular carcinoma) and pancreatic cancer (pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma), with plans to advance them into phase 1 clinical trials next year. The goal is to develop therapeutics that are designed to provide a step-change improvement over the current standard of care for these cancers.

The long-term plan, however, is to build on its immunotherapies to create an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered pipeline to deliver personalized medicines for each patient within weeks, with the aim of making cancers ‘manageable chronic conditions’.

Not just this, the other frontier it has ambitiously set its sights on is global biosecurity.

In August, Stanford researchers used AI to design completely new viruses. But it's not just that—today, anyone without any fundamental understanding of virology or molecular biology can use frontier AI models such as ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini to develop and release a superbug.

How do you prepare for this? In June, PopVax announced the Immune Engine, an always-on, full-stack capability to rapidly design, test and manufacture targeted therapeutics against AI-designed viruses in weeks, not years, using generative AI and its own mRNA platform.

“We view ourselves as sort of a transitional engine for turning machine intelligence into medicine,” said Sankaran.

Best of the best

While PopVax’s team is a mix of veterans and young graduates from top global and Indian universities as well as leading global and domestic biotech firms, attracting talent to India can still be a challenge.

“India has the blessing and the curse of scale. We have a lot of scientists…Many of them have not had the option to work on novel or exciting science in an industry context,” Sankaran said.

PopVax is doubling down on sharing its work and ambitions online to attract global talent to work in India, where the biotech ecosystem and infrastructure are still nascent.

“We should do a better job of showing the rest of the world what we’ve been up to, and sort of giving them the opportunity to be a part of this environment,” Sankaran said. “India has its disadvantages…we have to go a bit hard and say what kind of a better job is this as compared to a US startup?”

Experts believe that solving for talent must be a priority. “From a talent point of view, first off, making India an attractive destination to come and do research—you have to look at how we can attract the right people. How do we ease the integration, the second is ease of capital availability to get started, and the third is around infra,” said Vikash Agarwalla, India leader, healthcare practice, BCG.

To date, PopVax has raised over $30 million through research contracts and equity funding. It is now preparing for its next round of funding in the coming months, and this time it’s gunning for a larger ticket size of at least $50 million.

This is the second in a six-part Mint series on biotech startups.