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Developing a variant-proof coronavirus vaccine
UK-based Baseimmune is a biotech startup founded to create vaccine that could provide immunity against all future coronaviruses and predict new variants. But how? Pathogens are evolving constantly to adapt and ensure their survival, meaning they are a constantly moving target for vaccines. Baseimmune uses deep learning to predict the direction that a pathogen will take to create vaccines that are many steps ahead and future proof.
Their unique platform is based on powerful technology, which generates antigens using a level of informatics depth not previously seen. This way they're able to tackle emerging and challenging pathogens, and most importantly able to ensure that vaccines remain effective even if a pathogen mutates.
In January 2020, even when there was just a small amount of data available about the Covid-19 virus, we predicted the key variants that would emerge, like the South African one.
Josh Blight Co-founder at Baseimmune
We keep missing the bullseye
“Pathogens are a bit like dartboards and the vaccine the dart. The problem is that the dartboard keeps moving, sometimes we manage to hit them whilst others we can never hit in time. We are seeing this now with reduced vaccine efficacy against emerging COVID variants.” This is how Baseimmune Co-founder likes to explain the problem their team is tackling.
The founders met while working at the Jenner Institute at the University of Oxford, where they developed vaccines for a various of diseases. Baseimmune was founded in August 2019 and now manufacturing and testing of an ASFV vaccine is underway. They expect to deliver a vaccine against Africa Swine Fever in few years.
Founders 
Baseimmune's founders are Ariane C. Gomes, Phillip Kemlo, & Joshua Blight
Ariane, CEO, is a biologist specialised in immunology and vaccine development and she holds a DPhil in Clinical Medicine from the University of Oxford. She has contributed to the pre-clinical development of 6 vaccines developed during her time at the University of Oxford’s Jenner Institute.
CSO, Josh has a DPhil in Vaccinology and Infectious Diseases from the University of Oxford and has a strong scientific background in a broad spectrum of diseases from dengue and chikungunya to human papilloma virus (HPV) and malaria.
Phillip, CTO is a computer software engineer with a broad skill set including data management, system virtualisation and task level parallelism.
Significant partners
Co-development of a malaria vaccine
Baseimmune and researchers from Imperial College announce co-development of a multi-epitope malaria vaccine. They are combining forces with the laboratory of Professor Jake Baum at Imperial College London to design and test an entirely new strategy in protein-based vaccinology, with capacity for rapid scalable GMP manufacture. Read more about the collaboration here.
We call this vaccines with plasticity. Imagine only needing one flu shot instead of one every year, that's vaccines with plasticity.
Joshua Blight Co-founder at Baseimmune
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