Solaris Vaccines is dedicated to transforming global health by developing safer, more effective medical interventions and processes against infectious agents such as viruses, bacteria, parasites and fungi. Our technology uses the effective combination of UV light and Vitamin B2 to completely inactivate high risk pathogens while maintaining their immune-stimulating antigens, resulting in improved vaccines and therapeutics. It also provides a unique approach for addressing the presence of microbial contaminants in a wide array of life science products, efficiently and at scale. As a result, the Company has two distinct and compelling product categories and paths to revenue: 1. Creating novel life-saving medical interventions; and 2. Providing advanced bioprocessing instrumentation. To date, Solaris has received significant interest and support from both the US Departments of Defense and Health & Human Services.

The Problem: Responses to infectious disease outbreaks take far too long and often result in underwhelming impact. Medical interventions are not fully protective and do not provide durable prevention of infection. Many current approaches employ complex technologies, toxic chemicals, or unfamiliar components, which contributes to public skepticism as substantiated by decreasing vaccine utilization in the US. As a result, there is an urgent need for new approaches to creating products that are not only safe and effective, but also scalable, accessible, and readily adopted.

The Solution: The mechanism of action underlying the SolaVAX™ platform has been in routine clinical use for inactivating pathogens in the human blood supply since 2008. The method employs the well-established ability of UV light in the presence of the photosensitizer vitamin B2 (or riboflavin) to modify nucleic acid structure. The specificity of this chemistry allows the preservation of intact antigens to elicit an authentic and protective immune response when used as vaccines, or as the starting material to produce therapeutic antibodies. The use of riboflavin—a generally recognized as safe chemical agent—as the photosensitizer, eliminates concerns over potential toxicity to either personnel handling the chemical in production or to final recipients of the inactivated material, both simplifying and accelerating the manufacturing process. SolaVAX inactivation at scale is enabled by the Company’s SolaFLOW device, in which a pathogen-containing solution is passed through a long, tightly coiled tubing while exposed to UV light at precisely controlled wavelengths and intensities that maximizes inactivation while retaining immunogenic antigens in their native state.

Market Opportunity: The Solaris value proposition is based on a multipronged product strategy, providing both near-term, capital equipment driven revenue, and longer-term, larger upside vaccine and therapeutic opportunities. The Company will manufacture and sell SolaFLOW devices across multiple verticals, including pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, life science reagent producers, and bioprocess equipment suppliers. Both instrument and consumable sales will generate significant income for Solaris, which in turn will be used to advance its internal research and development of high-value vaccine and therapeutic antibody product candidates. These validated assets will be licensed to partners in the space, resulting in additional revenue streams. Building a diversified product portfolio will make Solaris an attractive acquisition opportunity by suitors from multiple industries. The Company may also elect to spin out its hardware business from the vaccine and therapeutics capability, affording additional value growth prospects as well as the operational flexibility to adapt to changing market environments.