iBio and GE Healthcare extend Alliance into plant-based vaccines

iBio and GE Healthcare have entered an alliance to commercialise plant-based technologies for the manufacture of biopharmaceuticals and vaccines, extending a collaboration originally formed in 2010.

The latest agreement involves the creation of a single facility with the ability to reduce the capital and operating costs of biotherapeutic and vaccine manufacture.

It combines GE Healthcare's technologies to manufacture biopharmaceuticals and other protein-based therapeutics, with iBio's own platform iBioLaunch.

This tool causes plants to rapidly produce high quantities of proteins that can then be used in vaccines.

It is based on gene expression technology, which can be scaled-up within low cost, controlled-growth facilities, according to iBio.

This provides potential to manufacture proteins that cannot be commercially produced in any other system.

The agreement will also see iBio's R&D collaborator, Fraunhofer US Center for Molecular Biotechnology (CMB) continue its involvement in the iBioLaunch platform.

Previous work involving the plant-technology includes an alliance between iBio and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation that has been used to produce an avian influenza vaccine candidate that successfully completed phase I clinical trials recently.