Portfolio company The Vaccine Group (“TVG” or the “Company”) has made significant progress made in developing animal vaccines based on its novel technology to tackle COVID-19.
Two of the Company’s vaccine candidates have enjoyed success in in vitro, pre-animal trial laboratory testing. Following this important milestone, TVG is now preparing to test the two vaccine candidates in animals. Two further vaccine candidates are also under development. The Company is also investigating the longer-term potential for human vaccines.
The milestone was reached within eight weeks of the Company receiving antigen protein sequences. Frontier IP holds a 17 per cent equity stake in TVG, which raised £680,000 in January this year. Along with its international partners, it has been awarded more than £9 million in grant funding from the UK, US and Chinese governments for work on a range of non-COVID-19 animal vaccines.
The overall progress made by TVG during the past year is likely to result in a material valuation uplift in the holding of TVG in the Group’s audited results to 30 June 2020. The Group’s book value of TVG as at 30 June 2019 was £1.6 million, which was reflected in the valuation of the fundraising completed in January 2020.You can learn more here.
Vaccinating animals is a proven way to stop diseases from jumping one species to another and spilling over to humans. It has taken TVG just eight weeks to reach its first major milestone in developing vaccines to combat COVID-19 in animals, and we are optimistic the Company will continue to make strong progress.
Neil Crabb, Chief Executive Officer, Frontier IP Group
Like all other human coronaviruses, SARS-CoV-2 emerged originally from animals. There have already been a number of reported cases of human to animal transmissions of the virus and recently what appears to be the first evidence of animal to human transmission from mink.
Associate Professor Michael Jarvis, co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer, The Vaccine Group
