LEBANON, N.H.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Oct. 9, 2002--GlycoFi, Inc., a company developing yeast-based protein production platforms for the biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries, today announced that it has been awarded a $2 million grant through the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). The goal of the three year project, titled "Production of Therapeutic Proteins Through Metabolic Engineering of Yeast," is to enable high capacity production of safe, low-cost, biological drugs using the company's proprietary yeast strains.
NIST's Advanced Technology Program (ATP) is designed to support high risk research and development projects that, if successful, will lead to revolutionary new products and contribute significantly to the nation's economy. "This ATP research grant will allow us to bring our technology to the marketplace up to two years ahead of our original company projections," stated CEO Charles Hutchinson, "not only strengthening our position in the world market, but also contributing broad-based economic benefits to the protein manufacturing industry."
Biologic drug discovery has outpaced the biopharmaceutical industry's capacity to manufacture them, creating a bottleneck in the flow of new drugs from the laboratory to the clinic. GlycoFi's technology is targeted to meet the industry's critical need for vastly increased production capacity for the expression of therapeutic proteins. The currently favored mammalian cell production platforms, mostly cell lines from Chinese hamster ovaries (CHO) have low productivity and are not able to meet the industry's capacity needs.
Right now, only mammalian cells are able to add human-like sugars to the proteins, a process called glycosylation. Yeast are able to produce proteins at a higher yield than their mammalian cell counterparts, but yeast glycosylation is recognized as "foreign" by humans, rendering yeast derived proteins unfit for human therapeutic use. By engineering yeast to perform human-like glycosylation, GlycoFi will produce therapeutic proteins that are safe and effective in humans at yields far exceeding mammalian cell culture technology.
"We are extremely pleased that NIST is supporting GlycoFi's scientific approach. By producing therapeutic proteins in yeast, we will help to alleviate the bottleneck in protein production that is preventing new and much needed drugs from entering clinical trials," said Dr. Tillman Gerngross, Chief Scientific Officer. "We anticipate significant impact on the biologics manufacturing industry and the cost of protein based therapies."
About GlycoFi:
Through metabolic engineering of fungal glycosylation pathways, GlycoFi is developing safer and more efficient platforms for production of therapeutic proteins. In April 2002, GlycoFi received a $7 million round of venture capital funding led by Boston's Schroder Venture Life Sciences, following a previous round in December 2000 led by Polaris Venture Partners.
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Contact:
GlycoFi
Charles Hutchinson, 603/643-8186 x103
charles.hutchinson@glycofi.com
glycofi.com |
