VaxThera Agrees to License Codagenix’s Synthetic Yellow Fever Vaccine

Grupo SURA-Backed VaxThera Targets a Global Vaccine Shortage

VaxThera S.A.S., a Colombian biotechnology company backed by Grupo SURA (BVC: GRUPOSURA; OTC: GIVSY), and Codagenix Inc., a clinical-stage biotechnology company based in Farmingdale, New York, announced September 15, 2026, that they have reached an agreement on terms for VaxThera to exclusively license a synthetic yellow fever vaccine candidate from Codagenix. Under the agreement, VaxThera plans to take the candidate, known as Syn17D-YF (CDX-470), through manufacturing, preclinical and clinical development, regulatory registration and commercialization in markets the companies have not yet specified.

Codagenix describes Syn17D-YF as the world’s first fully synthetic yellow fever vaccine candidate built for modern cell-culture manufacturing. The company says the candidate’s synthetic DNA sequence matches the genome of yellow fever vaccine strain 17D-204, the strain behind YF-VAX, the version manufactured by Sanofi (EPA: SAN; NASDAQ: SNY) and authorized by the FDA in the United States, as well as the Robert Koch Institute‘s own 17D strain and the World Health Organization‘s 17D Reference Lot 168-73. Codagenix says its own testing found the candidate to be genetically stable and capable of high yields in cell culture without the mutations toward pathogenicity that have defeated earlier attempts to move 17D-204 derivatives out of eggs.

Every yellow fever vaccine currently licensed anywhere traces back to the Asibi or 17D-204 strains isolated in the 1930s, and all of them are still produced in embryonated chicken eggs, a process that limits how quickly manufacturers can scale output and that researchers have linked to recurring shortages and a comparatively poor reactogenicity profile tied to egg- and process-related impurities. Codagenix says its cell-culture approach is designed to avoid both problems by allowing easier virus recovery and purification, which the company says leaves fewer host-protein and DNA impurities in the finished product.

The deal comes as the region VaxThera and Codagenix are targeting faces a worsening outbreak. The region logged 346 confirmed cases and 143 deaths in 2025 — nearly six times the case count and close to five times the death toll reported in 2024 — followed by 34 more cases and 15 deaths in the first seven weeks of 2026. The Pan American Health Organization reported that Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, Peru and Venezuela all had sustained yellow fever transmission as of March 2026. Colombia alone recorded 125 cases and 46 deaths in 2025, according to PAHO, which has urged countries to keep strategic vaccine stockpiles on hand and to maintain vaccination coverage of at least 95% among exposed populations, noting that most confirmed cases in 2025 and the first weeks of 2026 were in people who had not been vaccinated. The World Health Organization’s Eliminate Yellow Fever Epidemics strategy, running from 2017 through 2026, has pushed for the same kind of expanded, more affordable vaccine access the companies say their agreement is meant to support.

“Yellow fever is part of the history of Latin America, but we should not let vaccine shortages define its future,” said Jorge Osorio, chief executive officer of VaxThera. “This is what we set out to do when we built VaxThera: put our science and advanced manufacturing to work in Colombia on challenges that go well beyond our borders.”

“Yellow fever is part of the history of Latin America, but we should not let vaccine shortages define its future.”

— Jorge Osorio, CEO, VaxThera (above photo)

VaxThera was founded in 2021 with Grupo SURA’s backing and has since built what the company describes as an integrated research, process-development, quality-control and manufacturing operation in Rionegro, near Medellín’s international airport. The project has required roughly $100 million USD in investment, funded primarily by Grupo SURA rather than the Colombian government, Osorio told Finance Colombia last year. Osorio, a Colombia-born professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison‘s School of Veterinary Medicine, previously co-founded Inviragen, a dengue vaccine developer that Takeda Pharmaceutical (TSE: 4502; NYSE: TAK) acquired for up to $250 million USD in 2013. VaxThera says its Rionegro facility, built to international GMP standards, now has the potential to produce more than 150 million doses of biologics annually, positioning the company, and Colombia, as a regional manufacturing base for vaccines that have historically been made in only a handful of countries.

Codagenix was spun out of research at Stony Brook University, in the laboratory of National Academy of Sciences member Eckard Wimmer, and counts Adjuvant Capital, TopSpin Partners and Euclidean Capital among its investors. Its platform is built on codon deoptimization, a technique for redesigning a virus’s genetic code so that it still triggers an immune response while losing its ability to cause disease. Syn17D-YF is one of several live-attenuated and synthetic-biology vaccine and viral-therapeutic candidates in the company’s pipeline, which also includes ongoing research and licensing programs with several US federal agencies.

“Syn17D-YF modernizes the manufacturing of a proven and needed vaccine, and VaxThera provides the vision, capabilities and regional position required to advance it toward global impact,” said Jeffrey Fu, Codagenix’s chief business officer.

VaxThera and Codagenix said they intend to keep working together toward the broader goal of strengthening yellow fever vaccine supply chains in both endemic and non-endemic regions. Neither company disclosed the financial terms of the license or a timeline for when Syn17D-YF might reach preclinical or clinical trials in Colombia.

Above: Vaxthera CEO Jorge Osorio (photo: Liliana padierna)