Abivax cashes €8.4 million from Bpifrance for antiviral drugs research

Abivax said on Tuesday it would receive €8.4 million from “Projets de R&D Structurants Pour la Compétitivité” (PSPC) of the “Invest in the Future Program” (PIA).

This program is supervised by the General Commissariat of Investment (Commissariat Général de l’Investissement) and operated by Bpifrance. Abivax said this money is an opportunity to scale-up its antiviral platform.

Jeremy Berthuin, Head of Healthcare sector at Bpifrance, said: “With this funding we aim at accelerating the development and launch of novel antiviral drugs for critical unmet medical needs.”

Professor Hartmut Ehrlich, MD, CEO of Abivax said: “The fact that our anti-HIV drug candidate ABX464 already has shown antiviral efficacy in clinical Phase IIa testing in HIV-patients and that we also were able to identify several other novel compounds from our proprietary library that selectively inhibit other viruses, including chikungunya, were strong arguments to convince the steering committee of the strength of our innovative platform.”

Under this new program, Abivax will lead a consortium, including the CNRS and qualified contract research organizations (CROs). A total budget of €18.8 was approved for the project over a period of five years. The total funding provided by Bpifrance is €10.3 million, of which €8.4 million are a mix of loans and subsidies for Abivax and €1.9 million for the CNRS.

The platform already has been validated by ABX464, a potential functional cure for HIV, currently in Phase II testing. In addition, the platform has generated other compounds inhibiting the replication of other viruses, including ABX311, which is in preclinical testing for treatment of Chikungunya, Abivax said.