Clover Bio Australia, a division of Sichuan Clover Biopharmaceuticals, announced a $3.5 million investment from CEPI, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness, to develop a COVID-19 vaccine. The company will use the money to start an Australian Phase I trial of its COVID-19 S-Trimer vaccine candidate, a vaccine based on Clover Bio’s proprietary Trimer-Tag© platform. The platform, which is usually used to develop cancer candidates, produces the spike proteins of the COVID-19 virus in a native trimeric form.

If the vaccine is successful in clinical trials, Clover Biopharmaceuticals will quickly scale up production using its in-house biomanufacturing capabilities.

The collaboration is the ninth collaboration that CEPI has made to address the COVID-19 pandemic, bringing its total investment in COVID-19 R&D to $39.6 million. On February 6, CEPI invited applications to fund vaccine technology that could be used to develop a vaccine against the new coronavirus quickly, at scale and with equitable access provisions.

Richard Hatchett, CEO of CEPI said, “We are delighted to partner with Clover Australia on their innovative COVID-19 S-Trimer vaccine candidate. They produced their vaccine within a month of the virus sequence becoming available, and they have rapidly advanced toward a first in human trial. This vaccine candidate is an important new addition to the CEPI portfolio. CEPI has invested in a diverse range of innovative vaccine platforms, as well as more established vaccine technologies, to maximise our chances of success as we pursue our ambition of making COVID-19 vaccines available for broad use.”

Joshua Liang, Chief Strategy Officer of Clover Biopharmaceuticals and co-inventor of COVID-19 S-Trimer vaccine candidate said, “At Clover Biopharmaceuticals, we are proud to receive CEPI’s funding and support for Clover Australia, which are critical to enabling the ongoing development and acceleration of our COVID-19 S-Trimer vaccine program that utilizes our innovative Trimer-Tag© platform technology. We have been working tirelessly and hope to contribute significantly to global efforts in fighting this pandemic that has affected us all.”

Clover is developing a portfolio of novel biologics and biosimilars. The company touts its Trimer-Tag© technology as a way of discovering molecules for targets that cannot be targeted through other means.

See our other articles on Clover.

Disclosure: none.