Christian Harding, VaxNewMo CEO
“The Pipeline experience, I’m really excited about, because I think it’s truly going to help transition me from being a scientist to more of a scientific entrepreneur, or just more of a business-minded scientific entrepreneur,” VaxNewMo CEO Christian Harding told the 4thEst8 about his inclusion into the 2021 cohort of Pipeline Fellows. “I don’t have that canonical business training, that M.B.A.-type training that you see a lot of entrepreneurs have.”
The Kansas City-area Pipeline Fellowship is industry agnostic. It takes high performing entrepreneurs who call the Midwest ‘home’ and schools them in basics like business models, finding customers.. all to accelerate business growth. 13 entrepreneurs from the region were chosen. See the StartlandNews article for the full list.
VaxNewMo was founded in 2016, has three full time employees (including Harding) and is headquartered at BioGenerator Labs in the Coretex complex of St. Louis. Harding has fueled the business largely through non-dilutive grants – $4.2 million so far. Some came from the likes of Arch Grants, but the bulk come from the U.S. Government through Small Business Innovation grants, notably a $3 million Phase 2 grant from the National Institutes of Health. BioGenerator is also an investor.
The money fuels VaxNewMo research into making vaccines against bacteria, rather than the well known ones against viruses. They’re making a two-part vaccine called a ‘conjugate’ vaccine. A conjugate vaccine is a type of vaccine which combines a weak antigen with a strong antigen as a carrier so that the immune system has a stronger response to the weak antigen. They’ve been around for decades, but existing technologies to make them are complicated and expensive.
“We’ve engineered the lab-safe bacteria called E-Coli, to manufacture conjugate vaccines for us,” said Harding. “We’ve patented that process, and we call it ‘bioconjugation.’ And we’re using our bioconjugation platform to make specific vaccines set against pneumococcal pneumococcus and streptococcus pneumoniae, or GBS or klebsiella. So it’s kind of fun to be both a product and a platform development company at the same time.”
Harding says GBS stands for ‘Group B Streptococus’ and is a bacteria that causes deadly disease in pregnant women and devloping babies.
“We have another one in our pipeline for a hospital-acquired infection,” he added. “People go into the hospital for whatever routine procedure and sometimes they’re (infected by a) bacteria that’s present in the hospital.”
