ViraTherapeutics

Austrian based ViraTherapeutics GmbH (ViraT) was a privately held biopharmaceutical company developing promising innovative virus-based immunotherapeutics for the treatment of cancer. ViraT was founded in 2013 as a spin-out of the Medical University of Innsbruck by Prof. Dr. Dorothee von Laer, Head of the Division of Virology at the University. ViraT develops oncolytic cancer vaccines based on a chimeric virus derived from the Vesicular Stomatitis Virus (VSV), so called VSV-GP. Initially, ViraT received Pre-Seed financing funds from STARTUP.TIROL (previously CAST, Center for Academic Spin-offs Tyrol), Tyrol, and from the Austria Wirtschaftsservice GmbH (aws - the Austrian Government Promotional Bank). ViraT was funded by the Boehringer Ingelheim Venture Fund (BIVF), EMBL Ventures and the Empl foundation, as well as by the aws through its Venture-Capital-Initiative and Seedfinancing program and by the Austrian Research Promotion Agency (FFG) through several programs. The company currently has 19 employees. ViraT won the international life science business plan competition Best of Biotech 2012 and was awarded the second prize in the Science4Life venture cup 2013. ViraT has a collaboration with the Medical University of Innsbruck, which includes a team of scientists from the laboratory of Prof. von Laer and scientists of the Christian Doppler Laboratory for Viral Immunotherapy of Cancer at the university headed by Dr. Guido Wollmann.