In many ways, Fabentech is a product of plagues. The French maker of treatments for deadly viruses and biotoxins got its start with two infamous disease outbreaks: Ebola and avian influenza, known as “fowl plague”.
Bertrand Lépine, a former vice president of Sanofi Pasteur, founded the company in 2009 with the idea of fine-tuning technology licensed from Sanofi Pasteur to create polyclonal antibody treatments that would neutralise lethal viruses and toxins better than existing therapies, such as monoclonal therapies. Sanofi Pasteur had already used the technology to develop polyclonal antibody treatments that prevented snake and scorpion venom from penetrating human cells. Lépine thought the same approach could be used for deadly diseases.
By 2012, the company was conducting clinical trials for a treatment for avian flu, and by 2015 it was working with the World Health Organization and the European Medicines Agency on Ebola therapies. In 2017, it partnered with the French Army to develop an antidote for a highly lethal biotoxin that comes from plants.
While all the treatments were promising, none of them found a big market. Before the pandemic, Europe wasn’t actively addressing the potential threats of bio-attacks or new forms of infectious disease. That contrasted with the United States, which after September 11, 2001, financed biotech startups that were developing treatments.
“There just wasn’t a culture of preparing for biothreats in Europe,” says Sébastien Iva, the chief executive of Fabentech.
Then COVID-19 hit.
“That was a paradigm shift, because all the individual EU countries, along with EU institutions, started to prepare for these kinds of threats,” says Iva, who joined Fabentech in 2020, just as the pandemic was unfolding. “Budgets started to be dedicated to it.”
Preparing for biological threats
One of those budgets is HERA Invest, financing provided by the European Commission’s new directorate-general on Health Emergency Preparedness and Response (HERA). The European Commission created DG HERA in 2021. Part of its mandate is to support European companies and research that address antimicrobial resistance, biodefense and pandemic readiness.
The European Investment Bank in October 2024 signed an agreement to provide Fabentech with €20 million in venture debt financing. It is the first investment made under HERA. Fabentech will use the money to further develop its FabShield polyclonal antibody treatments, which grew out of the original Sanofi Pasteur technology, and to scale up production of therapies to treat a range of pathogens, like the Nipah virus and Sarbecoviruses, the family of viruses behind COVID-19, along with plant-based toxins.
“For us, HERA is really an unwavering ally that will help us all prepare for future biological threats, whether they be an intentional bio-terrorism attack or naturally occurring epidemics or pandemics,” Iva says.
Fabentech is leading a consortium, called e-Fabric, of European universities and firms working on treatments for Sarbecoviruses, which the WHO says has a high-risk of starting another pandemic. SARS-Cov-2, the virus behind COVID-19, is part of the Sarbecovirus family. The consortium, which is working on treatments based on Fabentech’s polyclonal antibody treatments, received a €7.7 million grant from the European Commission’s Horizon Europe programme in January 2024.
“They were already earmarked by HERA and by the European Commission,” says Henri- François Boedt, the European Investment Bank loan officer in charge of the Fabentech investment. “And they are conducting research on a subject where much research and significant financing is needed.”
The big one: COVID-19
When Iva joined Fabentech in July 2020, the company’s board told him to shift the firm’s focus to high-profile treatments for COVID-19. Fabentech quickly developed a polyclonal antibody treatment for COVID-19 and its variants, called FabenCOV, with the support of EU funds. The lightning development of COVID-19 vaccines and virus mutations somewhat quashed the need for that treatment, although it showed promise in neutralising known COVID-19 variants.
But what had become immediately clear to Europe was the need to identify other lethal viruses that could quickly morph into pandemics and to develop a stock of potential treatments.
Many of the treatments for COVID-19 used highly targeted monoclonal antibodies, which basically bind to the spike protein on the surface of the SARS-Cov-2 virus and prevent it from entering cells. As the virus mutates, however, many of these treatments lose their effectiveness.
Polyclonal antibody treatments take a broader approach to a virus or toxin, says Ginger Smith, a senior economist in the European Investment Bank’s life sciences division.
The polyclonal treatments work like this:
- They identify and target various receptors, or epitopes, that exist on an antigen. Antigens are typically a protein, lipid or nucleic acid that exists on the surface of a virus or toxin.
- The polyclonal antibodies bind to several sites (epitopes) on a single antigen.
- By binding to the epitopes, the antibodies effectively neutralise the virus or toxin by blocking its ability to enter human cells and cause infection or illness.
“The polyclonal treatments will really catch the virus from all sides and angles,” Iva says. “If a virus has mutated, monoclonal treatments will no longer be able to attach themselves very well, so they won’t be very effective. The polyclonal will still be able to attach itself to part of the antigen and, therefore, be able to neutralise the virus or toxin.”
A ‘really very dangerous’ virus
In addition to treatments for Sarbecoviruses, Fabentech is also working on another deadly virus with pandemic potential. The Nipah virus was first identified in 1998 during an outbreak in Malaysia and Singapore. It gets its name from the Malaysian village of Sungai Nipah, where pig farmers became ill with encephalitis, a swelling of the brain. The virus, which can be transferred from animals to humans, kills about 40% to 75% of people it infects.
“It’s really very dangerous,” says Iva of Fabentech.
Fabentech has been working on a polyclonal antibody treatment for the Nipah virus since 2022, which was funded by a French government programme.
The French, American and German governments have been worried about the Nipah virus for a while, Iva says. Right now, the virus is unable to pass between humans, but a mutation could change that. In an outbreak, Fabentech’s treatment could effectively halt the virus in its path, by disarming it in human hosts before it starts to circulate widely. The company hopes to release its treatment in 2027.
Focus on the next crisis
Iva and his colleagues spend their days thinking about the next pandemic or a bio-attack.
“We know that we’ll be touched, in one way or another, by a biological event,” he says. “It will arrive.”
He says that since COVID-19, EU governments and institutions have made addressing these threats a priority. But developing effective therapies to treat new pathogens requires a deep well of funds. And in Europe, private investors can be hard to find.
“What keeps me up at night, is to not have enough money to deploy everything we are doing,” Iva says. “Because our products will be able to not only save lives, but also effectively contain pandemics.”
