$1.1 Million Award Advances Biology-informed Artificial Intelligence Platform

Biotechnology company Apriori Bio recently announced it was awarded $1.1 million from the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) to advance its biology-informed artificial intelligence platform Octavia™, aimed at protecting humanity against rapidly evolving viruses by designing variant-resilient vaccines.

The new seed funding from CEPI will focus on pandemic influenza strain H3N2, which has previously affected pigs, birds, and humans.

The Octavia platform works by characterizing large libraries of viral variants on their ability to bind to cells in the human body and evade the immune response. Then, using machine learning, Octavia generates maps to identify the mutations that have the greatest ‘escape potential’ and could, therefore, pose the greatest threat.

Octavia builds and trains its algorithms using computational insights and experimental biological data. This includes studying viral evolutionary trees to identify the point at which viral variability is most likely to occur and exploring how mutations could affect each other.

These insights can guide the design and updating of new vaccines and existing vaccines so that they can protect against worrisome variants for years to come.

Lovisa Afzelius, Ph.D., MBA, Co-founder and CEO of Apriori, said in a press release on July 7, 2024, “We are honored to be recognized by a global leader in pandemic preparedness who shares our commitment to better protecting humanity from rapidly evolving viruses."

CEPI’s 2022-2026 plan, known as CEPI 2.0, will help the world make the scientific progress needed to respond to the next Disease X threat with a new vaccine in just 100 days. This goal is known as the 100 Days Mission.