Our immune systems are fascinatingly complex. I promise not to go into too much detail here, but if you’re at all curious, I encourage you to read more about it. The key points to note is that the system is able to do two very important things: adapt quickly to protect our bodies from foreign material and to recognize self molecules (when the immune system stops being able to distinguish between self and foreign objects, auto-immune diseases arise, and that is a completely different conversation.) Our immune systems have been evolving and adapting over millions of years. As we get exposed to new objects, referred to as antigens (Ags), even those that didn’t exist before we were born, our immune system can create antibodies (Abs) against them. Again, if you’re curious, I encourage you to read more.

Edward Jenner was the first to recognize a way to harness the immune system to prevent disease. He recognized that “fair milkmaids” were not scarred by the pox marks caused by smallpox. This, he hypothesized, was because they were exposed to a less harmful cowpox virus, making them immune to smallpox. To test this, he inoculated a young boy with the pus from a cowpox blister, exposed the boy to the smallpox virus, and noticed that the boy never developed smallpox. From this, the first vaccine (named after the Latin word for cow) was born.

Vaxxinity and its science are equally clever and fascinating. The company leverages the immune system, utilizing its ability to create antibodies against a specific target. But its proprietary platform “tricks” the immune system to target disease-causing self-proteins. As a result, the company harnesses the immune system to create medicines to treat chronic diseases. The company’s Vaxxines essentially turn our bodies into drug factories. As a result, these medications are easier to administer to patients and cheaper than many medications to produce. The company’s mission is to democratize health. It recognizes that chronic diseases can potentially affect everyone throughout the world, even though treatments for these diseases may only be accessible to very few. Vaxxinity is working to change that.

The company and its leadership are very clever. The work it is doing is not necessarily new, it just greatly improves upon treatments that are already working. It is not the first company to use the immune system to treat disease. Monoclonal antibodies were identified in the 1990s as a way to utilize the antibody-antigen recognition mechanism to deliver targeted treatments to diseased cells. Over the years, monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) have become widely adopted to treat many different conditions. In fact, you can recognize when a drug is a monoclonal antibody because its name ends in “ab” for example, trastuzumab (Herceptin) to treat breast cancer or bimekizumab (Bimzelx) to treat psoriasis. The challenge with monoclonal antibodies, however, is that they are produced outside of the body, often in a mouse, and then get infused into patients. The production makes these treatments extremely expensive and the delivery mechanism a challenge to patients. Combined, the treatments are typically only accessible to patients with the money and the time to receive them. Making treatments for chronic diseases accessible to more people and using those treatments to help prevent disease from occurring, puts Vaxxinity in a position to do good and do well.