Owl Posting How do you make a 250x better vaccine at 1/10 the cost? Develop it in India. (Soham Sankaran, Ep #2)
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Feb 3, 2025 Soham Sankaran, founder and CEO of PopVax and former computer scientist-turned-vaccine entrepreneur. He explains why India can deliver radical, low-cost vaccine R&D, how PopVax pairs ML with massive empirical testing to design smarter immunogens, and why end-to-end, India-based labs speed iteration and cut costs dramatically.
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India's Cost Advantage Multiplies Experimental Bandwidth
- Building PopVax in India gives a 5–10x cost advantage for wet lab and animal work, letting the team test far more constructs per dollar.
- Soham says this enabled thousands of in vivo tests and >10,000 animals, accelerating iteration versus US startups.
Fund R&D Aggressively And Recruit Global Talent
- Spend far more national GDP on R&D and launch a targeted talent-repatriation program to attract global researchers back to India.
- Soham suggests an Indian equivalent of China's Thousand Talents plus multi-year funding to seed labs and students.
Antigen Versus Immunogen Is A Critical Distinction
- Antigen ≠ immunogen: the pathogen antigen may not elicit the protective antibody response unless presented in the right conformation.
- Example: RSV F protein in native form caused antibody-dependent enhancement; pre-fusion–stabilized F became the effective immunogen.