Israeli startup SynVaccine, which develops vaccines based on synthetic biology, has raised $1.7 million. The Tel Aviv-based company has developed a proprietary technology that identifies significant parts of viruses and develops vaccines for them containing the significant components for arousing a response from the immune system and excluding any hazardous elements.
David Zigdon, president and CEO of the RAD BioMed incubator where SynVaccine was founded, said, “The process of developing vaccines now is like this: you take a deadly virus, and by trial and error try to kill or weaken it without harming immune activity. SynVaccine, on the other hand, is studying the important characteristics of viruses, and in effect is assembling them from scratch, but without the problem parts.”
The company was founded on the basis of commercialized research from Tel Aviv University and Weizmann Institute of Science led by Prof. Tamir Tuller, who mapped 3,000 different viruses.
SynVaccine sees its future in building “positive viruses” that not only cause the creation of antibodies against one family of viruses similar to them, but also generally strengthen the immune system’s activity, so that it can more successfully attack both a variety of entities penetrating the body and dangers inside the body, such as cancer.
