FARMINGTON, CONN. (HARTFORD BUSINESS JOURNAL) JANUARY 31, 2022
A member of UConn’s Technology Incubation Program since 2017, Ashley Kalinauskas’ veterinary pharmaceutical startup Torigen Pharmaceuticals Inc. is getting ready to venture out on its own.
The company, which is developing a cancer vaccine for animals, has raised $7.7 million to date, most of it in the last two years, and recently signed a 9,090-square-foot lease in Farmington, at 6 Executive Dr., where it will move its operations by summer.
Kalinauskas, Torigen’s 31-year-old founder and CEO, has seen early promise with an animal cancer vaccine called VetiVax. The vaccine was invented in 2006 at the University of Notre Dame by then-researcher and professor Mark Suckow, who is now Torigen’s chief technology officer.
The VetiVax vaccine, which has eight patents owned by Notre Dame and licensed to Torigen, is regulated by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Center of Veterinary Biologics as an experimental therapy with unproven safety and efficacy, but the company is working toward obtaining conditional licensure. It would need to go through clinical trials to get there.
A selling point is that the vaccine is a less-invasive option than chemotherapy. VetiVax has already been used by more than 2,000 animals nationwide, primarily dogs, but also cats, horses, two tigers and a zebra. About 300 veterinary offices administered the vaccine in 2021, Kalinauskas said.
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