Local vaccine maker VLP Therapeutics plans to double its Gaithersburg space in July as it comes off of a $21 million funding round.
It will maintain its roughly 3,000 square feet at 704 Quince Orchard Road, even as it takes over a similarly sized space next door that was vacated during the pandemic, founder and CEO Wataru Akahata told the Washington Business Journal.
The expanded headquarters will include new lab space geared toward the biotech’s vaccine pipeline, which includes cancer treatments as well as dengue and malaria prevention, all still in preclinical phases. The company aims to start phase 1 trials this and next year for the malaria and dengue vaccines in time to seek Food and Drug Administration approval in 2024. Its cancer vaccine candidate, currently focused on head and neck, colon, skin and stomach cancers, is only slightly further off, expected to start phase 1 clinical trials in 2023 and seek FDA approval as soon as 2025.
While cancer vaccines used to be considered a “faraway field,” Akahata said with VLP’s focus on the immune system, “it’s getting closer and closer.”
Akahata, a former National Institutes of Health senior scientist who founded VLP Therapeutics in 2013, said he is also looking for a handful of people to add to the company's current 20-person team. That includes a chief medical officer and chief operating officer to beef up the company's C-suite — VLP hired a chief business officer in Miwa Toyoda last spring — as well as additional scientists to help develop its vaccines. All told, he said, the biotech is looking at up to five or six hires in 2022.
It already has some notable biotech names behind it. A year after Akahata first started up VLP Therapeutics, he brought on Sucampo Pharmaceuticals Inc. founders Sachiko Kuno and Ryuji Ueno as his own fellow co-founders to further shape and grow the company. Kuno and Ueno had founded Sucampo in 1996, taken it public in 2007, shepherded two drugs to the market and sold the company for $1.2 billion to U.K. pharmaceutical Mallinckrodt PLC in 2018. Kuno has since focused on their philanthropic endeavors, including S&R Foundation and its Halcyon entrepreneurial incubator and funding offspring. Ueno currently also serves as VLP’s chairman and current chief medical officer.
With their help, VLP raised $21 million in a Series A-1 funding round last month with investors Nobelpharma Co., Japanese MUFG Bank (NYSE: MUFG), Sojitz Corp., Miyako Capital Co., Robert Hisaoka and SK Impact Fund. Shortly before that, it had raised $16 million in a Series A round in March.
Akahata said the company doesn’t expect to start another round of funding this year — he said it’s focused on pushing ahead on research and development for its current slate of vaccines. But he estimates it will pursue a Series B round in 2024, one for a “much larger” amount, he said, depending on how much the company is valued at the time.
Meanwhile, Tokyo-based subsidiary VLP Therapeutics Japan is currently working on a Covid-19 vaccine. The subsidiary began a clinical trial in October of that vaccine, which Akahata said would require a smaller dose and allow for faster production than either the Pfizer or Moderna vaccines for the coronavirus. He said the division plans to start phase 2 and 3 trials next spring.
