Apriori Bio has become the latest Flagship Pioneering-backed biotech to shed staff, cutting 15 workers to leave 21 still employed at the vaccine-focused firm.
“Apriori has reached an inflection point as we transition from building out our platform to accelerating the development of our pipeline,” an Apriori spokesperson told Fierce Biotech in an email. “As we advance toward the clinic, we have made the decision to redesign the structure of our team, leading to a reduction of our workforce by 15 employees.”
Apriori hasn’t publicly disclosed its pipeline. The company’s spokesperson also didn’t provide any update on specific programs the biotech is working on following the job reduction.
The layoffs at Apriori follow other shake-ups in Flagship’s biotech portfolio. Novo Nordisk-partnered Omega Therapeutics struck a restructuring deal last month with its founder Flagship, sending the firm on the path toward bankruptcy.
Viral-vector-focused Ring Therapeutics and cell signaling company Sonata Therapeutics, both backed by Flagship, ended last year with layoff rounds that also saw both of their CEOs head out the door.
Apriori’s platform, called Octavia, uses artificial intelligence to generate variants of virus proteins and model how antibodies interact with them, with the goal of predicting which virus variants could be the most dangerous and generating vaccines to protect against them in advance.
Apriori found a new leader late last year in Craig Williams, who was promoted to CEO-partner after first being brought on in 2023 as the biotech’s president and an operating partner of Flagship. Williams previously spent more than two decades at GSK and ViiV Healthcare.
Flagship unveiled another AI-inspired company just last week, a firm called Lila Sciences that raised $200 million in seed funding. Lila’s goal is to achieve “scientific superintelligence” that can help researchers design and test hypotheses with the aid of fully autonomous laboratories.