Abera Bioscience has found the right recipe for giving its innovative and versatile vaccine platform the best possible conditions to succeed.

Uppsala-based Abera Bioscience was founded ten years ago, as a spin-out from the biosimilars company Xbrane Bioscience. Maria Alriksson, CEO of Abera and former CEO of Xbrane, describes the process of separating the two companies.

“Then we realized that by attaching the proteins to the surface we had the embryo of a vaccine delivery platform. That was too good an idea to not develop further and at the time we split the companies into two.”

“At Xbrane we focused on the development of efficient ways of producing proteins and we developed several ideas. One of them focused on translocation of proteins over the membranes of gram-negative bacteria to simplify purification of proteins. Then we realized that by attaching the proteins to the surface we had the embryo of a vaccine delivery platform. That was too good an idea to not develop further and at the time we split the companies into two. Abera had been awarded a couple of large grants to develop the technology further and start generating proof of concept for the ideas. The timelines and business models for Xbrane and Abera were quite different and therefore it was logical to separate them into two,” she says.

So, Abera became a vaccine platform development company and today, Maria Alriksson and her colleagues develop vaccine candidates and immunotherapies based on these platforms. The company uses a plug’n’play-like technology, based on over 30 years of research by mainly Ass. Prof. Joen Lurink at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (founder and CTO of Abera). The technology makes it possible to design a new vaccine candidate in a couple of weeks, hence, speeding up the vaccine development process significantly.

The main platform is based on an outer membrane vesicle (OMV) derived from gram-negative bacteria that is decorated with a large number of disease-specific antigens. “The final vaccine molecule is similar in size and structure to a virus and the vesicles are composed of bacterial proteins – together it makes them very immunogenic and there is no need for further adjuvants,” explains Maria.

“We can also administer the vaccines in different ways, such as our pneumococcal vaccine that is given as a nasal spray.”

The platform is also very versatile and the company has proof of concept for both bacterial and viral diseases. “We can also administer the vaccines in different ways, such as our pneumococcal vaccine that is given as a nasal spray,” says Maria.

Besides its main vaccine candidate (Ab-01.12) against pneumococcus that causes e.g. pneumonia, meningitis and sinusitis, the company works on – together with collaboration partners – vaccine development within COVID-19, Chlamydia, Tuberculosis and ETEC (Enterotoxigenic Escherichia coli).

Beside the above mentioned benefits of the platform, the production of the vaccines are very cost-efficient with well-established methods and few process steps, adds Maria. “The platform is also suitable for pandemic preparedness where the OMVs could be pre-produced and kept in a freezer and if new bacteria or virus appears we just have to identify and produce the antigens and couple them together to get a new vaccine,” she says.

 

Mats Lundgren CSO Abera and Bart van den Berg senior scientist Abera visiting Testa Center.

 

The basis for next generation vaccines

Currently, Abera Bioscience is producing material for its upcoming toxicological studies of Ab-01.12, as well as preparing the regulatory documentation necessary to apply for entering the first clinical trials in 2023, describes Maria. The company also recently announced a collaboration with NorthX Biologics for the development and verification of its production process of Ab-01.12 in industrial scale.

Already from the early days of the company Abera has been engaged in many collaborations, both with the biotech industry and academia, to develop and refine the platform. Many collaborations have received significant financial support from EU (Horizon 2020, Eurostars and Eureka), governments and non-profit health organizations, enabling the company to advance.

“There are so many complex parts of developing a vaccine, so you need to team up with different expertise to succeed. By collaboration with disease experts who can identify promising antigens for a specific disease, for example, we can together develop novel vaccines,” explains Maria.

“Moving forward we would love to also enter collaborations with industrial partners that have the resources to bring the vaccines through to clinical trials as well.”

For the pneumococcus vaccine candidate the company has had a close collaboration with Radboud University, the Netherlands, for many years. “They are true experts within pneumococcus and it has been very successful. Moving forward we would love to also enter collaborations with industrial partners that have the resources to bring the vaccines through to clinical trials as well,” Maria says and explains the business strategy further. “Our strategy is to develop vaccine candidates to late pre-clinical or early clinical stage for out-licensing for further clinical testing by larger corporations. We now aim to bring the pneumococcus vaccine through the early clinical stages to get a clinical proof of concept for both the candidate and the platform.”

“We see many applications of the platform and one we are now investigating is personalized cancer vaccines.”

The company’s opportunities on the market for vaccine development lie in the fact that the company can develop multiple vaccine candidates, emphasizes Maria.

“Today, there are still many diseases where no vaccines exist or the existing vaccines are not so efficient, and we believe that our platforms can be the basis for next generation vaccines. We see many applications of the platform and one we are now investigating is personalized cancer vaccines.”

One step at a time

Being located in Uppsala, Sweden, means having a good ecosystem for life science around, with competitive companies and organizations for most of the things you need during the different stages of development, believes Maria. “There is also a very collaborative approach, which is great. I think one of the challenges is the financial landscape where biotech companies have a low valuation compared to e.g. the U.S.”

Lessons learnt from developing Abera are many, she recalls. “One thing is that you do not know everything from the start, but you can learn a lot during the journey if you are open to it and take one small step at a time.”

 

Maria Alriksson, CEO, Abera Bioscience