Apriori Bio, a Boston, MA-based biotechnology company providing innovations against viral threats, raised US $1.1M in funding.
CEPI made the investment.
The company intends to use the funds to biology-informed artificial intelligence platform Octavia™.
Led by CEO Lovisa Afzelius, Apriori is biotechnology company providing innovations against viral threats. Its approach centers on a technology platform, Octavia™, which allows to survey the entire fitness landscape of existing and potential viral variants to design new vaccines. It can also inform public health policy in real time by predicting the impact of emerging variants.
The Octavia platform works by characterising large libraries of viral variants on their ability to bind to cells in the human body and evade the immune response. Then using machine learning, Octavia generates maps to identify the mutations that have the greatest ‘escape potential’ and could therefore pose the greatest threat. These insights can guide how new vaccines are designed and how existing vaccines are updated so that they can protect against worrisome variants for years to come.
Octavia uses both computational insights and experimental biological data to build and train its algorithms. This includes looking at evolutionary trees of viruses to identify the point at which viral variability is most likely to occur and exploring how mutations could affect each other.
The company was founded in 2020 by Flagship Pioneering.
Commenting on the news, Lovisa Afzelius said: “We are honoured to be recognized by a global leader in pandemic preparedness who shares our commitment to better protecting humanity from rapidly-evolving viruses. With CEPI’s support, we will continue advancing our Octavia platform, focusing on viruses beyond coronavirus, to ensure the global community is better prepared to effectively address future outbreaks with precision and speed.”
FinSMEs
08/07/2024