Osivax is a Lyon-based clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company developing vaccines designed to provide broad-spectrum protection against highly mutating infectious viruses. Its lead candidate, OVX836, is a broad-spectrum influenza A vaccine candidate developed using the company’s oligoDOM™ self-assembling nanoparticle platform.
For Alexandre Le Vert, CEO of Osivax, the company’s story began with a mix of personal ambition, scientific opportunity and a clear unmet medical need. Together with the company’s co-founders and early supporters, Alexandre saw the potential to build a company that could address major gaps in both seasonal and pandemic flu prevention, while giving him a way to scale the impact he could have in the medical field.
Osivax’s mission is to develop novel vaccines against highly mutating respiratory viruses. The company started with influenza, a virus that changes frequently and can escape the protection provided by conventional seasonal vaccines.
The company’s approach is built around the ambition to develop vaccines that could be effective against all strains of a single respiratory virus. OVX836 targets the influenza nucleoprotein, a highly conserved internal antigen, and Osivax’s platform is designed to activate both T-cell and B-cell immune responses.
While influenza remains the company’s main focus today, Osivax is already looking beyond it. The company is expanding its oligoDOM™-based pipeline to other viruses, including a broad-spectrum sarbecovirus vaccine candidate and a pan-strain human papillomavirus vaccine candidate developed by DKFZ.
For Alexandre, building Osivax has been shaped by hard work, scientific discipline, the right ecosystem and a degree of timing.
“Luck is great to start with, but then it really comes down to having the right people in your team, the right investors and also the right public support.”
That support has come not only from the European ecosystem, including the European Innovation Council, but also from the United States Government.
Osivax’s leadership team is strongly rooted in science, medicine and technology. The company’s management includes engineers, PhDs and medical profiles, supported by a finance function that plays an essential role in enabling scientific work.
“We are all driven by this relentless search for the good data for the root cause of why we have some successes and where we have some failures and all in order to build a better product.”
This data-driven culture shapes how the team works. For Osivax, progress depends on people being able to speak the same language, challenge one another and remain focused on improving the product.
“As a team, we are always challenging ourselves aggressively, yet also respectfully and constructively, never accepting the easy answer.”
The goal is not to avoid complexity, but to understand it. Alexandre does not believe in intellectual shortcuts: simple answers are welcome when they are accurate, but complex problems often require complex thinking. That means continuing to ask why, again and again, until the team can reach an explanation that supports better decision-making.
Like many deep tech and biotech companies, Osivax has faced challenges on several fronts at once. These include scientific and technological questions, competition, business development and fundraising.
One of the company’s major technological challenges has been controlling the manufacturing process as it scales. This is a familiar issue for vaccine companies, and Osivax has been addressing it continuously since its creation.
The company has also had to navigate the broader dynamics of the vaccine market. At one point, negative results published by a competitor created doubts around projects in the same field.
Rather than distance itself from the issue, Osivax took a data-driven approach and worked to understand whether the competitor’s outcome had any bearing on its own product.
The comparison helped show that the products were different, with Osivax’s candidate demonstrating stronger parameters on several elements.
For Osivax, the key question was not whether another product had failed, but whether that failure had any scientific relevance to its own candidate. The process reinforced the importance of evidence over assumption.
Fundraising has brought its own challenges. Osivax has had to bring in new funders at different stages, supported by public entities such as the European Innovation Council and the US Government.
When closing its Series B round, the company also needed to secure a lead investor. That role was ultimately taken by a strategic Japanese partner from the pharmaceutical sector, enabling other investors to follow.
For Alexandre, Osivax’s greatest achievement is not only the progress of its vaccine candidates. It is the team the company has built along the way.
He describes the most meaningful milestones as seeing people join, grow, learn and work together on difficult vaccine development challenges. When team members later move on to roles in large pharmaceutical companies, he sees it as a sign of the credibility Osivax has built.
In that sense, Osivax has become more than a biotech company advancing a scientific platform. It has also become a place where people develop expertise that is recognised across the wider industry.
Osivax has been part of the European Innovation Council ecosystem for several years, having previously received EIC support. When the company was invited to apply to the EIC Scaling Club, Alexandre says the decision was straightforward.
In a sector as complex and demanding as vaccines, access to the right network can make a meaningful difference. Through the Club, Osivax has benefited from mentorship and strategic conversations, including around fundraising.
The company’s lead influenza candidate is now in Phase 2b clinical development. In September 2025, Osivax announced that the first participant had been vaccinated in a Phase 2b trial designed to assess efficacy, safety and immunogenicity in 2,850 participants across European countries.
As Osivax continues its work on influenza and explores future applications of its platform, its trajectory reflects the long-term nature of biotech scaling: combining scientific evidence, patient capital, public support and a team willing to keep asking difficult questions.
The EIC Scaling Club is a curated community where 120+ European deep tech scale-ups with the potential to build world-class businesses and solve major global challenges come together with investors, corporate innovators and other industry stakeholders to spur growth.
The top 120+ European deep tech companies will be carefully selected from a pool of high-growth scale-ups that have benefitted from EIC financial schemes, other European and national innovation programmes, and beyond.
The EIC Scaling Club is an EIC-funded initiative run in partnership by Tech Tour, Bpifrance (EuroQuity), Hello Tomorrow, Tech.eu (Webrazzi), EurA and IESE Business School.
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