COMPANY HISTORY:
Vaxiion Therapeutics was founded by Dr. Roger Sabbadini and Neil Berkley at San Diego State University in 2000 and is 1 of 4 biotechnology companies to emerge from San Diego State's College of Sciences. Professor Sabbadini has extensive experience as a serial bio-entrepreneur having started both Lpath Therapeutics (www.lpath.com) and more recently Mpex Pharmaceuticals, (www.mpexpharma.com).  The Western States Investment Group (www.wsig.com) has led every round of financing since Vaxiion's incepetion.

MINICELL HISTORY:
Minicells were discovered by microbial geneticists studying cell division in Gram-negative bacteria over 40 years ago. Since then, minicells have been used to study other aspects of microbial genetics and physiology as well as phage transduction, protein synthesis, and plasmid biology. After 1990, minicells were seldom reported in the literature outside of the context of plasmid-borne protein synthesis or cell division gene studies.  Major advances in molecular biology, microbial genetics, cancer biology, and genomics -along with the efforts of Vaxiion- have resurrected minicells as a viable and highly flexible targeted delivery platform.

Scanning Electron Micrograph of a single purified minicell (above).