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Biotech / Medical : LSBC -- Large Scale Biology Corp. -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: nigel bates who wrote (97)	10/9/2002 7:16:38 PM
From: scaram(o)uche	Respond to of 144

Agilent To Enter Licensing Pacts For Drug Research Products Wednesday October 9, 5:09 pm ET By Bill Richards For DOW JONES NEWSWIRES SEATTLE -(Dow Jones)- Agilent Technologies Inc. (NYSE:A - News) plans to announce new licensing agreements with Millennium Pharmaceuticals Inc. (NasdaqNM:MLNM - News) and Large Scale Biology Corp. (NasdaqNM:LSBC - News) , expanding its line of products for developing protein- based drug research. ADVERTISEMENT The agreements are expected to be announced this week, Taia Ergueta, director of business development for Agilent's Life Sciences and Chemical Analysis unit, told Dow Jones Newswires. "It's the beginning of the third stage of our proteomics program," Ergueta said. In the first phase last year, Agilent developed products for preparation of protein samples. "Then, in the last nine months, we have brought our mass spectrometer hardware and software systems into the program," she said. The latest licensing agreements expand the program to include software and biochemistry, Ergueta said. Agilent plans to market the software as part of its Synapsis Informatics Workbench software package. Agilent will pay Millennium and Large Scale Biology Corp. an undisclosed amount for the licenses. No date has been set for when the new software will be included in Agilent's Synapsis package, she said. More than 30% of Agilent's Life Science revenue is generated from recurring sales of products used in its existing software and hardware programs, Ergueta said. Products developed from the new licenses will add value to those existing systems and tend to have higher margins, she said. Under an agreement with Millennium, Agilent, Palo Alto, Calif., will develop and sell software based on Millennium's SpectrumMill software, which Millennium has been using internally for protein-based drug research. The software allows researchers to analyze large volumes of data compiled using mass spectrum analysis. The agreement also gives Millennium, Boston, early access to products being developed as part of Agilent's proteomics research. The licensing agreement with Large Scale Biology will permit Agilent to develop new methods of spotting disease targets for new drugs, based on Large Scale Biology's proteomics research into the separation of low-abundance proteins from serum samples, such as blood. The Large Scale Biology license will cover the development of research products, while the Millennium license will cover both research products as well as additional products, Ergueta said. For the nine months ended July 31, Agilent posted a loss of $796 million, or $ 1.71 a share, on revenue of $4.27 billion. The company's stock closed Wednesday at $10.90, down 10.9%.

To: nigel bates who wrote (97)	4/26/2003 10:50:36 AM
From: nigel bates	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 144

Parking... GlycoFi Achieves Major Milestone Toward Producing Fully Humanized Protein Therapeutics in Fungal Systems Report of First Hybrid N-Glycan Produced in Yeast Published in Proceedings of the National Academy Of Sciences LEBANON, NEW HAMPSHIRE - Apr. 15, 2003 - GlycoFi, Inc. today announced the publication of a major scientific milestone in efforts to produce complex human glycoproteins in high capacity fungal production systems. Published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, GlycoFi researchers report the “Use of Combinatorial Genetic Libraries to Humanize N-linked Glycosylation in the Yeast Pichia pastoris.” Most human therapeutic proteins are decorated with complex sugar structures, called glycans, which give the proteins their full biological function and human identity. Fungal protein expression systems offer inherent advantages over mammalian cell culture currently used for biopharmaceutical production. Most notably, fungal expression offers shorter fermentation time, higher productivity, simple molecular biology and the lack of animal-derived growth media requirements. Until now, however, yeasts and fungi have been unable to replicate complex human glycosylation structures, and thus, could not be used to produce human therapeutic glycoproteins. “Demonstrating for the first time the production of “hybrid” glycosylation structures in yeast brings GlycoFi an important step closer to dramatically improving the capacity and cost of producing therapeutic proteins,” Tillman Gerngross, Ph.D., Chief Scientific Officer of GlycoFi noted. “In fact, we have already gone beyond this work to demonstrate production of much more complex glycans and expect to manufacture fully complex human glycoproteins -- sialylated glycoproteins -- in one of our fungal production systems before the year’s end.” GlycoFi scientists genetically re-engineered the secretory pathway of P. pastoris to perform a series of sequential glycosylation reactions that mimic the early processing of N-glycans in humans. After eliminating non-human glycosylation from the yeast by deleting the initiating alpha-1,6-mannosyltransferase gene, several combinatorial genetic libraries were inserted into the yeast in such a way that the yeast synthesized new human-like glycosylation structures, conducting the relevant biochemical reactions in the proper sequence and location within the yeast cells. “The glycosylation structures we are seeing in our yeast are of a purity and uniformity unprecedented in biopharmaceutical manufacturing,” said Stefan Wildt, Ph.D., director of Strain Development at GlycoFi. “This will allow GlycoFi to harness the inherent advantages of fungal protein expression systems and thereby address the biopharmaceutical manufacturing industry’s capacity issues.” GlycoFi’s fungal production systems are coming at a very integral time for the biopharmaceutical industry, notes GlycoFi Chief Executive Officer Charles Hutchinson, Ph.D. “Production capacity has led to a bottleneck within the biopharmaceutical pipeline,” Dr. Hutchinson states. “The result is that some approved therapeutic protein drugs cannot be produced in adequate amounts, and still others are not making it into commercialization due to the cost and inefficiencies of producing them in mammalian cell culture systems. In essence, GlycoFi is providing a software solution (higher productivity) to the biopharmaceutical industry’s existing hardware problem (limited capacity). It is our hope that this push to producing homogeneous, human-like glycoproteins in yeast will eliminate the production capacity bottleneck, and allow for the production of better and safer drugs.” About GlycoFi GlycoFi, Inc. was founded in 2000 with the mission of dramatically improving the capacity and cost of producing human proteins, while simultaneously enhancing their efficacy and safety as therapeutics. The company harnesses the inherent advantages of yeast and other fungal-based protein expression systems by engineering these systems to produce fully humanized proteins, thus greatly increasing the efficiency, fidelity and scalability at which those proteins can be made. For more information on GlycoFi, please visit the company’s website at www.glycofi.com.