Centivax

Centivax is a therapeutics company founded to treat and eradicate the remaining pathogens of the 21st century. Centivax was spun out of a series of internally incubated technology projects run at Distributed Bio. Centivax and their CEO Jacob Glanville were featured in the Netflix documentary series "Pandemic," talking about their vaccine technology.

Centivax began at Distributed Bio as a vaccine for mutating and naturally polymorphic pathogens of HIV, influenza, Chagas disease, sleeping sickness, Dengue, and Zika. Distributed Bio developed Centivax, an epitope focusing technology that focused the immune response against conserved parts of pathogens that cannot mutate, offering a Universal Vaccine design.

In two repeat studies in sus scrofa (pig) in Distributed Bio's animal facility, the epitope focusing vaccine induced antibodies against 39 viral strains of influenza spanning the last century, including all pandemic events (1918 H1N1 Spanish flu, 1957 H2N2 Asian flu, 1968 H3N2 Hong Kong flu, 1977 H1N1 Russian flu, 2002 H3N2 Fujian flu, and 2009 H1N1 Swine flu).

In a Centivax vaccine designed using only pre-2009 viral strain information, the vaccine further elicited broad neutralizing immunity against future pandemic and seasonal viral strains. Observation of an inverse-dose response, single antigen tests, and 159 monoclonal pig antibodies recovered from immunized animals further clarify the mechanism of epitope focusing by Centivax.

Centivax is engineering monoclonal therapeutics against pathogens through computationally guided antibody discovery. This program is part of their response to SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19), through which they have used the Distributed Bio SuperHuman 2.0 antibody discovery technology and the Tumbler computational antibody optimization technology to discover thousands of antibodies against a novel virus in nine weeks.

Centivax's work in vaccines includes the work done with Distributed Bio on their epitope-focusing technology to guide the immune response against conserved parts of pathogens that cannot mutate. Centivax's flu vaccine is supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and featured on Netflix's Pandemic: How to Prevent an Outbreak.

Centivax's oligoclonals use a mixture of two or more monoclonal antibodies for when multiple proteins need to be targeted, such as multiple toxins from a bacteria or in snake venom. Their broad-spectrum antivenom is supported by the National Institutes of Health, through which Centivax is developing a human, broadly neutralizing oligoclonal antivenom. Centivax's antibiotic oligoclonals are supported by MTEC and the NMRC in which they are developing a human, broadly neutralizing oligoclonal antibiotic to neutralize viral factors and toxins secreted by common wounds and sepsis causing bacterium.