Collaborative Innovation for Global Health Impact
At Bilex Pharma, we recognize that addressing complex global health challenges requires collaborative effort across disciplines, sectors, and geographies. Our partnership approach lies at the heart of our innovation strategy, enabling us to combine our technological strengths with complementary expertise from academia, industry, public health organizations, and government agencies. Through strategic alliances, we accelerate scientific discovery, enhance development capabilities, and expand the reach of our vaccines to communities worldwide.
Academic Collaborations
Our deep connections with leading research institutions fuel scientific discovery and provide access to specialized expertise that complements our in-house capabilities. The academic partnerships we’ve cultivated create a dynamic exchange of knowledge that propels vaccine science forward while training the next generation of scientific leaders.
The University of Oxford represents one of our most productive academic relationships. This collaboration has been instrumental in advancing our structural vaccinology work, particularly through shared research at the Oxford Scientific Operations facility. Together with Oxford researchers, we’ve made significant strides in understanding optimal antigen conformations for vaccines targeting respiratory pathogens. The university’s renowned expertise in immunology and infectious diseases continues to inform our approach to challenging vaccine targets.
Our relationship with Imperial College London has proved especially valuable for respiratory virus research. Imperial’s scientists provide critical insights on viral pathogenesis and immune responses that support our Project SHIELD initiative. This partnership extends beyond laboratory research to include clinical evaluation of our vaccine candidates, with Imperial researchers serving as principal investigators in several of our clinical trials, including our RSV vaccine studies.
The University of Cambridge’s strengths in computational biology and systems approaches to immunology complement our in-house capabilities. Cambridge researchers collaborate with our teams on advanced analytics of immune responses to vaccination, helping us decipher the complex signatures that predict protective immunity. This work proves particularly valuable for identifying correlates of protection that can accelerate vaccine development.
Beyond these major relationships, we maintain focused collaborations with the University of Edinburgh on emerging infectious disease surveillance, the University of Strathclyde on manufacturing process improvement, and the University of Manchester on thermostability formulation research. Each partnership addresses specific needs within our development programs while building our broader scientific foundation.
Industry Partners
While we maintain independent development capabilities, strategic partnerships with other industry players allow us to leverage complementary technologies, expand manufacturing capacity, and create innovative approaches to vaccine deployment. These collaborations often address specific technical challenges or create novel combinations that neither company could achieve alone.
Our technology exchange agreements with several complementary platform companies enable cross-fertilization of ideas without compromising our proprietary positions. These arrangements allow selective sharing of specific technological approaches while maintaining appropriate intellectual property boundaries, creating mutual benefit through focused collaboration.
Manufacturing collaborations represent another important dimension of our industry partnerships. As we advance multiple candidates through late-stage development, these relationships provide additional production capacity and specialized capabilities that complement our Manchester facility. These partnerships will be particularly crucial as our lead candidates approach commercialization, ensuring adequate supply to meet global needs.
We’ve also established distribution and commercialization relationships focused on specific geographic regions where local expertise in regulatory pathways and healthcare systems can significantly enhance vaccine access. These partners bring invaluable knowledge of implementation challenges and opportunities in diverse settings, complementing our scientific and manufacturing capabilities with on-the-ground insights.
Global Health Initiatives
Addressing global health challenges requires engagement with international organizations dedicated to improving health outcomes worldwide. Our partnerships in this sector ensure our vaccine development efforts align with global priorities and reach the communities that need them most.
Our strategic collaboration with PATH, announced in May 2024, represents a significant commitment to addressing malaria through vaccine innovation. This partnership combines our technological platforms with PATH’s extensive experience in developing and implementing health solutions in low-resource settings. Together, we’re advancing our BLX-MAL01 vaccine candidate with a focus not only on scientific excellence but also on practical considerations for deployment in malaria-endemic regions. PATH’s deep understanding of the complexities of malaria control and their established relationships with research institutions in endemic countries bring invaluable perspectives to this development program.
The Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) has become a crucial partner in our pandemic preparedness efforts. In January 2025, CEPI awarded Bilex Pharma a £15 million grant to accelerate the development of our rapid-response vaccine platform. This collaboration directly supports our Project RESPOND initiative, focusing on validating platform technologies that could compress vaccine development timelines during future pandemics. The partnership includes joint work on prototype vaccines against CEPI priority pathogens and thermostability advancements to enable global deployment.
Our active participation in the Global AMR Vaccine Consortium underscores our commitment to addressing antimicrobial resistance, one of the most serious threats to global health. Alongside other consortium members, including the University of Oxford, Institut Pasteur, and the Wellcome Trust, we contribute our vaccine development expertise to advance novel approaches for preventing infections caused by drug-resistant pathogens. This collaboration exemplifies how multi-stakeholder initiatives can tackle complex challenges through coordinated action.
The Wellcome Trust has provided valuable support for our neglected tropical disease research, particularly our work on dengue and chikungunya vaccines. Their commitment to advancing health in low and middle-income countries aligns perfectly with our Project SAFEGUARD initiative, creating opportunities for accelerated development of vaccines for diseases that disproportionately affect vulnerable populations.
Government Relations
Strong relationships with government agencies and public research institutions provide critical support for our innovation agenda while ensuring our work addresses public health priorities and maintains the highest standards of scientific and ethical rigor.
In the United Kingdom, our engagement with the UK Health Security Agency facilitates access to specialized testing capabilities and provides valuable epidemiological insights that inform our vaccine development strategies. This relationship proved particularly valuable during recent respiratory virus seasons, providing real-time data that supported the design of our RSV and influenza vaccine trials.
Our productive dialogue with the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) represents another important government relationship. Beyond the formal regulatory review processes, we engage with MHRA through scientific advice meetings that help shape our development programs from early stages. This constructive engagement contributed significantly to the June 2024 approval of our Manchester Manufacturing Facility for commercial production.
The UK Innovation & Science Seed Fund has provided strategic funding support for several early-stage research initiatives, allowing us to explore innovative approaches that might otherwise be considered too high-risk for traditional investment. This support proves particularly valuable for our platform enhancement work that lacks disease-specific commercial drivers but offers broad potential impact across multiple vaccination programs.
Internationally, we maintain relationships with health authorities in multiple regions where our vaccines may eventually be deployed. These connections help us understand diverse regulatory requirements and healthcare system needs, informing development decisions that maximize the global applicability of our candidates.
Licensing Opportunities
While we maintain internal development for our core programs, we offer licensing opportunities for selected technologies and vaccine candidates where external development may accelerate progress or expand impact. These arrangements typically fall into several categories, each structured to maximize the potential of our innovations while maintaining strategic alignment with our mission.
Our platform technology licenses permit partners to utilize specific aspects of our proprietary technologies for applications outside our core focus areas. These arrangements maintain field-of-use restrictions that protect our strategic interests while allowing our innovations to benefit additional disease areas or product types beyond vaccines. Current licensing opportunities include applications of our BiLipid™ delivery system for therapeutic mRNA and selected applications of our adjuvant systems for non-infectious disease targets.
Geographic licenses for specific vaccine candidates enable products to reach markets where we lack direct commercial infrastructure. These arrangements typically include technology transfer provisions, manufacturing support, and ongoing scientific collaboration to ensure successful development in the licensed territories. We prioritize partners with demonstrated commitment to access and affordability, particularly for products addressing diseases prevalent in low and middle-income countries.
Co-development opportunities present a collaborative model where we share development responsibilities and costs with partners bringing complementary capabilities. These arrangements maintain our scientific involvement throughout development while leveraging partner strengths in specific functional areas or geographies. Current co-development opportunities focus primarily on earlier-stage candidates where shared investment can accelerate progress toward clinical proof-of-concept.
Partnership Approach & Governance
Successful partnerships require more than scientific alignment—they demand thoughtful governance structures, clear communication channels, and shared commitment to collaborative success. Our approach to partnership management reflects these principles.
We establish transparent governance frameworks for each significant collaboration, typically including joint steering committees with clear decision-making authorities and escalation pathways. For major partnerships, we create dedicated alliance management roles to ensure consistent focus on relationship health alongside scientific and operational milestones.
Intellectual property considerations receive careful attention in all partnership arrangements. We develop clear frameworks that respect existing IP while establishing appropriate rights to collaboration results. These agreements balance our commitment to scientific publication and knowledge advancement with necessary protections for commercially valuable innovations.
Our collaborative development processes emphasize regular scientific exchange through structured forums while maintaining flexibility for informal interactions that often spark unexpected insights. We’ve found that balancing structured governance with scientific creativity creates the most productive partnership environments.
Looking Forward: Partnership Strategy
As we advance our pipeline and expand our technological capabilities, our partnership strategy continues to evolve. Several priorities will guide our collaborative approach in the coming years.
We’re actively expanding our network of clinical research collaborators in regions where our priority diseases create significant burden, particularly in South and Southeast Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Latin America. These relationships will enhance our ability to conduct relevant clinical studies while building research capacity in affected communities.
Increasing focus on implementation partnerships represents another strategic priority, recognizing that successful vaccination requires more than an approved product. We’re developing relationships with organizations experienced in healthcare delivery to better understand real-world implementation challenges and design vaccines with deployment considerations in mind.
We continue to seek manufacturing partnerships that can complement our UK-based capacity, particularly in regions where local production could enhance vaccine access and acceptance. These relationships will become increasingly important as our later-stage candidates approach approval.
Open innovation initiatives that foster broader collaboration around specific scientific challenges are emerging as an important component of our partnership approach. These structured but open collaborative frameworks allow diverse experts to contribute to defined challenges in vaccine design, manufacturing, or deployment.
Through our comprehensive partnership strategy, Bilex Pharma builds connections across sectors and geographies—creating a collaborative ecosystem that accelerates scientific progress, expands manufacturing capabilities, and ultimately enhances the reach and impact of our innovative vaccines. We welcome inquiries from potential partners who share our commitment to addressing infectious disease challenges through science-driven collaboration.