A small Swiss biotech tackles a huge global health issue with a handoff from GSK. But can it make any money from it?

Bioregnum Opinion Column by John Carroll

During the global pandemic, we got a good look at how a new technology can transform the vaccines market and earn billions of dollars in windfall profits from high-income countries. But it’s still a tricky market, with a huge need for vaccines directed at underserved communities of the world that are often simply neglected or spend years on the back burner of non-profit programs.

Take the Shigella bacteria, which can trigger lethal cases of shigellosis, spurring diarrhea in cases that spread from child to child, adult to adult, and killing around 600,000 people a year, largely in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.

Eight years ago, GSK’s then-R&D chief, Moncef Slaoui, bought out GlycoVaxyn, a Swiss biotech, for $190 million, grabbing its shigellosis vaccine and spinning out a new biotech called LimmaTech in the process. LimmaTech continued to work with GSK — which has a long history of non-profit R&D — and The Wellcome Trust on a development program, undertaking a monovalent challenge test of its vaccine. It is now pursuing a quadrivalent antigen-based vaccine.

Today, GSK is handing the program back to LimmaTech, providing the low-profile spinout development and commercialization rights to the multivalent vaccine that has emerged from the yearslong effort, with plans to run a Phase I/II trial in an effort to steer it to a market.

And LimmaTech is undertaking the effort with a new CEO who tried and failed to make a big mark on the Covid-19 market.

Given that it’s the kind of market that tends to chill investors, what story can LimmaTech tell here? Part of it deals with climate change, and part of it with a market for travelers and military personnel.

“With the shift of the heat zones because of the climate change, it is not out of the way that these kind of diseases, the bacteria diseases, will turn into a problem for the Western world as well,” says Franz-Werner Haas, a CureVac vet who helmed the company for three years. It was during his stint at the top that CureVac took on the Covid challenge against Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna — and lost big time in its bid to develop a vaccine.

This time there isn’t nearly as much competition or any existing vaccine on the market, but the team is convinced there is a significant market that awaits now, without any long-term spread of bacterial diseases.

“When people think of Shigella, they do think about the low- to middle-income countries, but in fact, we also see the chance for the traveler’s vaccine,” says Paul Wolfrom, a co-founder and CFO at LimmaTech. “And there is a growing recognition that Shigella is a problem for travelers and [the] military actually.” He also cites a Path-sponsored report claiming a substantial market for a vaccine.

GSK has another Shigella vaccine in the pipeline, and they’re both going to pursue approvals, with the small biotech offering a thumbs-up for the chance that more vaccine can be manufactured for the two vaccines if they both make it.

That’s the public health case to be made, but it’s hard to see how mutually cooperative vaccine programs can inspire the kind of investments biotechs seek out. That’s why you’re not seeing much of this kind of activity among biotechs scrambling to develop new drugs and vaccines.

It’s fine to talk about urgent medical needs in biotech so long as the market can pay for it. But investors shun charity R&D.

Neither GSK nor LimmaTech execs have anything to say about the terms of the rights deal. They’re being kept under wraps, and there was no wresting away any characterizations about the size of the deal, which is unlikely to include a whole lot of cash. LimmaTech currently has a staff of about 40 people who have been concentrating on anti-microbial resistance and gonorrhea.

They aren’t new to the game.

“That is a starting point for a company, which is quite mature with a lot of expertise in all the different fields, including manufacturing,” Haas says. “And as we have seen, manufacturing is key in order to scale up this one. With this uniqueness of people here in this field, which is not that clouded as the viral vaccines, I think there is a good starting point for the company to develop and to question, what are the next steps, certainly to build a pipeline and to develop the company.”

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