Accelerate LI’s Latest Startup Aims to Rewire Viruses With Software
Summary
The latest startup, Codagenix, founded by a group of current and former Stony Brook professors—Eckard Wimmer, Steffen Mueller, and Robert Coleman—has developed a way of making vaccines called “synthetic-attenuated virus engineering,” or SAVE.The idea is that this process will lead to a virus identical to the ones found in nature, and yield vaccines that trigger better immune responses in a wider range of people than traditional methods, while also being cheap to make.“We seek to construct a next generation flu vaccine—one that is highly effective each season for the young and elderly population, can be manufactured cheaply, and that could meet a global demand in the time of a pandemic emergency.Accelerate LI was formed a few years ago by the presidents of several of Long Island’s big research institutions, and other participants invested in the local startup scene.It’s backed by a $500,000 grant from the state of New York and an additional $750,000 from local VC firms—Topspin Partners and Jove Equity Partners—and is focusing on life science and clean energy technologies.