Inviragen | Series A $15M and M&A

Inviragen (Ft. Collins, CO) a preclinical-stage vaccine company focused on emerging global infectious diseases, closed a $15M Series A financing and in the process merged the assets of Singapore-based SingVax. Participants in the round include Charter Life Sciences, Venture Investors, Bio*One Capital and Phillip Private Equity. This initial round of institutional capital comes on the heels of a $600,000 grant, announced in September, from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease to partially support continued development of a dengue vaccine.

The new funding is expected to push a number of vaccine candidates into the clinic and yield proof-of-concept and efficacy data. The lead vax is designed to protect against dengue fever, a mosquito-borne disease that threatens 3.6 billion people living in tropical and subtropical regions around the globe; 36 million cases of dengue fever are thought to occur per year WW, the most severe form of the disease, dengue hemorrhagic fever, leads to the deaths of approximately 20,000 people annually.

Rounding out the robust Inviragen pipeline include vaccines against Hand, Foot and Mouth disease, Japanese encephalitis, West Nile, chikungunya, avian- (H5N1) and swine-origin (H1N1) influenza and, a combination plague and smallpox vaccine for biodefense.