Biotechnology company iBio (NYSE MKT: IBIO) with a plant-based platform to develop vaccines and therapeutics has formalized a collaboration agreement with a Texas-based life science company. A previous iteration of that company used iBio’s plant technology for a DARPA-backed large-scale production facility to develop vaccines and therapeutics using tobacco plants as part of “the GreenVax” project.
As part of the agreement, Caliber Biotherapeutics has licensed the plant technology at the center of its BioLaunch platform to develop a cancer vaccine, though details like the type of cancer that it would be used against were not disclosed. The collaboration will mean the two companies also combine their capabilities, as Caliber Biotherapeutics is now home to the largest manufacturing facility for plant-made biopharmaceutical products. To give a sense of its scale the facility can produce 300,000 doses of a typical antibody product, according to the announcement.
The BioLaunch platform causes common green plants to produce commercial quantities of targeted human proteins to be used as the active pharmaceutical ingredients for the development and production of biopharmaceuticals, according to the website. The technology cost more than $100 million to develop over a nine year period and it has received funding from the government as well as from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
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The two companies will also make iBio’s technology and Caliber’s facility available to third parties through licensing and partnering arrangements for other recombinant plant-based biotherapeutics and vaccines.
In a phone interview with MedCity News, Newark, Delaware-based iBio CEO Robert Kay said the Caliber transaction was developed for the purpose of putting its technology to use. “Our focus is enabling others to do product development.”
Referring to its agreement with GE Healthcare inked a couple of years ago, Kay said the company’s technology is making it easier to move into markets non US markets like Brazil, for example. The reason? Because they want to be self sufficient to protect against pandemic diseases such as H5N1 influenza
, better known as bird flu. and against bioterrorism threats so to accomplish that they need domestic facilities and flexible technologies like iBio’s and GE Healthcare’s.
One of iBios licensees is Fiocruz, one of the largest yellow vaccine vaccine developers in the world. Under the terms of the agreement with the Brazil-based company, Fiocruz is developing, commercializing and manufacturing iBio’s Yellow Fever vaccine. An estimated 200,000 unvaccinated people contract yellow fever each year, and about 30,000 die from the disease. The company is developing he vaccine not just for countries in South America but for people in African nations where Yellow Fever is endemic.
