Tag: vaccines

Company News: Okairos Raises €16 Million in Series B Financing

Swiss-Italian vaccine play Okairos today announced the closing of a €16 million series B financing round. The proceeds will be used to further advance Okairos’ product portfolio. The vaccines developed by Okairos are based on new, potent adenovirus vectors that can engage the cellular arms of the immune system to elicit a strong immune response involving T cells. The company is addressing major infectious diseases, e.g. malaria, HIV, hepatitis C and universal influenza. The financing was led by Versant Ventures and joined by the Boehringer Ingelheim Venture Fund. All existing investors – BioMedPartners, LSP and Novartis Venture Funds – also participated in the round. For further information, please visit the company’s website.

Food for Thought: Open Source Principles – A Concept for the Life Sciences?

In the IT industry, open source is an acknowledged development principle for software that uses peer review and transparency of the development process. The promise of open source is better quality, i.e. higher reliability, more flexibility, and lower cost, among others.
Now, this principle is spreading to the life sciences. For one, there is the Open Source Sensing Initiative which is trying to apply a bottom-up, decentralized approach to the development of sensors for security and environmental purposes. Read more…