PopVax is an Indian full-stack biotech building first-in-class and best-in-class vaccines and cancer immunotherapies using machine learning-driven design and relentless empiricism. We design, develop, and manufacture our own RNA medicines end-to-end because we believe great pharmaceutical science can only flourish in tight feedback loops that iterate rapidly. PopVax’s experimental work and clinical dose production is based at the RNA Foundry, our integrated R&D and GMP-capable clinical dose production facility in Hyderabad.
PopVax's north star is our goal of developing novel vaccines and therapeutics over the next decade with the cumulative ability to save 1 million lives each year – the Million Lives Mission. To that end, we are developing first-in-class vaccines against Hepatitis C Virus, Strep A, and adult pulmonary TB, broadly-protective best-in-class vaccines against COVID-19, influenza, and HPV, and precision immunotherapies against hard-to-treat solid tumours such as liver cancer and pancreatic cancer.
Our work is funded by Vitalik Buterin’s Balvi Fund, the Gates Foundation, the US Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), and Renaissance Philanthropy. Our first vaccine program will begin a Phase I clinical trial in the US in mid-2026 conducted & sponsored by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). We intend to put 6 novel vaccines and immunotherapies into Phase I clinical trials over the next 3 years.
No matter the job title, each person’s role at PopVax is ultimately focused on helping take safe & effective new medicines that represent a step-change improvement on the current standard-of-care to the people who need them as fast as possible. If you want to work where the ambition is high, the learning curve is steep, and the work matters to billions, you’ll feel at home here.
If you’re excited by the idea of advancing scientific, clinical, and regulatory frontiers of vaccines and immunotherapies, spending each day developing medicines with the potential to save millions of lives, and building a generational global pharmaceutical company in India along the way – join us!
Sure, text completion and image generation are cool, but do you know what’s cooler than training a transformer to power a ‘support’ chatbot with no actual power except the ability to frustrate online shoppers with smoother verbiage than the current generation of automatons or fine-tuning Stable Diffusion to replace a stunt double’s face with Pedro Pascal’s when he can’t be bothered to show up on the set of The Mandalorian IV: The Merchandise Revenue Rises? Making the GPUs go brr in service of saving millions of lives by helping design breakthrough new biomedicines.
PopVax is an Indian full-stack biotechnology company developing novel mRNA vaccines and therapeutics using computational protein design. Our first vaccine is a next-generation COVID-19 booster, which will enter a first-in-human Phase I clinical trial in the U.S. early this year. This vaccine is intended to broaden protection against both current and predicted future SARS-CoV-2 variants, reducing the possibility of a new mutation in the virus suddenly causing another massive wave of infection. We have a preclinical pipeline of 6 additional novel vaccine candidates built on our mRNA-LNP platform that we will be taking into clinical trials over the next few years. Our work to date has been funded primarily via project agreements totalling 10+ million USD with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Vitalik Buterin's public health & biosecurity organisation Balvi.
At PopVax, we have seen up close that there are incredible capabilities in computational protein design just waiting to be unlocked that will enable us to pursue and perhaps even succeed at realising wildly ambitious agendas such as preventing future pandemics via broadly-protective vaccines, tackling the deadly scourge of antimicrobial resistance, eliminating debilitating degenerative diseases like multiple sclerosis, and curing fiendishly tricky chronic conditions such as ME/CFS and Long COVID.
We seek to accelerate the development of these technologies while, at the same time, ensuring that the benefits they bring are available to everyone that needs them as soon as possible. If all of the advances made in this seminal moment are controlled by western pharmaceutical companies, they will do what they always do—hold on tight to the IP while people in the developing world die. We must ensure that we in the rising world are at the vanguard of this computational revolution, lest we condemn our people to remain forever at the mercy of the same corporate overlords who denied Africa affordable HIV antivirals in the late 90s and continue to deny Indians lifesaving cystic fibrosis treatment—just two among uncountable examples.
We are building and refining a set of models using a variety of architectures—from transformers to graph neural networks to denoising diffusion models—to solve key problems in the design of vaccine antigens, targeted therapeutics, and nucleic acid delivery chemistry. We have already seen some impressive results from our work—early versions of our first vaccine candidate perform 10-120x better than existing mRNA vaccines in pseudovirus neutralisation assays against key COVID-19 variants—but we need to expand our team with a small number of exceptionally competent and insatiably curious machine learning folks to keep the momentum going.
The ideal candidate need not have existing knowledge of biology but needs to deeply understand current SOTA ML architectures, both in theory and implementation—we want someone just as comfortable reading the latest ICLR paper as implementing and training a large model on AWS. They must be willing to learn quickly, build fast, and act independently in an environment with a non-trivial amount of uncertainty, and be willing to rapidly change direction to wherever the data points.
If you come and work with us, we hope that, in short order, its impact will accelerate work that saves or improves millions, and potentially billions, of lives. There aren’t many places that can offer you that kind of deep positive impact, not to mention the opportunity to work at the frontier of synthetic biology’s machine learning revolution.
Join us!