This Boulder vaccine maker has caught the attention and funding of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

A Boulder startup that began as a University of Colorado spinoff is getting national attention this year.

Just a few months after vaccine maker VitriVax notched a $29 million contract with the U.S. Department of Defense, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has awarded the company $5 million to work on the delivery of an HIV antigen.

The funding for VitriVax comes about nine years after it was first formed by co-founders Bob Garcea and Ted Randolph, two biology professors at CU Boulder.

The pair have since developed a new technology that makes vaccines thermostable — meaning they are resistant to damage from heat or cold — and delivered in just one shot. The proprietary technology called the Atomic Layering Thermostable Antigen and Adjuvant (ATLA) platform, aims to reduce the barriers to vaccinations, particularly in developing countries.

The two-year grant from the Gates Foundation will allow VitriVax to continue working on that new technology and to expand its manufacturing capacity to make enough doses for a phase one clinical trial, said Kimberly Erickson, VitriVax’s vice president of operations and principal investigator.

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VitriVax

The company will also use the grant to study the use of ATLA for antigens that target HIV, Erickson said. Eventually, she said the platform could be used to target areas in the U.S. and abroad that have historically struggled with vaccine access.

"In areas where maybe access to medical facilities is lacking, it really increases that patient compliance for preventing disease and future outbreaks," she said.

The U.S. defense contract, awarded to VitriVax in July, charges the company with finding a way to deliver a vaccine for Melioidosis and Glanders, bacterial infections that are endemic to Southeast Asia, The five-year contract aims to build on a newly developed vaccine by making it thermostable and delivered in a single shot.

While it's still in the preclinical stages, VitriVax has picked up its growth pace for about the last two years, Erickson said. The company last year moved into a new, 10,000-square-foot development facility on the outskirts of Boulder. It now employs 26 people and will soon hire three more, she said.

While VitriVax was around during the Covid pandemic, Erickson said the company mostly continued to focus on targeting vaccines that could be provided globally. She said one of the co-founders did work through a local grant on Covid vaccine scalability.

VitriVax completed a Series A funding round in 2021 but has since focused on recent grants that allow the company to continue the course, she said.