Some companies chase attention. Others engineer inevitability. Attivare Therapeutics has been living in the second lane since 2021, quietly formed inside Harvard’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering and now operating out of Natick, Massachusetts. The premise was never hype driven. It was discipline driven. If the immune system already knows how to fight, maybe the real unlock is teaching it where to stand, how long to stay, and when to move. That philosophy materialized as ATTImmune, a biomaterial scaffold that recruits, programs, and releases immune cells with 3D precision and real temporal control.
That patience just got rewarded. Attivare Therapeutics secured a $6.574M non-dilutive grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to advance a next generation, long lasting malaria vaccine. A 38 month commitment aimed at durability, affordability, and deployment in regions where cold chain fragility is not an inconvenience but a deal breaker. This follows a prior $4M Gates Foundation grant and a $5.88M seed round led by SymBiosis Capital Management, bringing total funding to roughly $16.46M without compromising platform ownership or long term optionality.
The founding DNA matters. Ed Doherty, Jessica McDonough, Fernanda Langellotto, Benjamin Seiler, Chyenne Yeager, and David J. Mooney did not reverse engineer a pitch deck. They built mesoporous silica rods that assemble in vivo, create a temporary immune microenvironment, sustain antigen exposure, and biodegrade after roughly 21 days. No permanent footprint. No wasted motion. Just immune cells getting the right signals for the right duration. The same architecture now supports oncology programs like ATT 02 for solid tumors and ATT 01 for AML, targeting cancers with low immunogenicity that usually shrug off standard immunotherapy.
Leadership scaled with intention. David Sherris stepped in as President, CEO and Chairman with decades of translational medicine experience. Robert Pierce brings clinical and scientific depth shaped by years in tumor immunology. Ed Doherty and Jessica McDonough anchor operations and execution, translating Wyss Institute science into something manufacturable, repeatable, and regulator ready. This is not a loose coalition. It is a composed system, closer to a well-mastered record than a noisy demo.
The business signal is loud if you listen carefully. Non-dilutive capital flows toward platforms that respect biology, logistics, and global realities. Attivare Therapeutics is not selling miracles. It is selling control, durability, and modularity across oncology and infectious disease. Fewer doses. Longer protection. Immune responses that actually stick. Same scaffold, different battles. When you build something that understands context, capital tends to follow early, stay patient, and let the work speak.
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