PlantForm granted U.S. patent for fast-growing transgenic plant line
Key technology underpins company’s rapid, low-cost platform for producing biologic drugs
GUELPH, Ont., November 17, 2022 —PlantForm Corporation announced today that the U.S. Patent Office has granted a patent for the Company’s bespoke line of Nicotiana benthamiana plants used to produce monoclonal antibodies, therapeutic proteins and vaccines.
Patent No. 11499160 – “Transgenic Plant With Reduced Fucosyltransferase and Xylosyltransferase Activity” – is a major milestone that gives proprietary protection to the KDFX plant line created by PlantForm scientists in a key research project that underpins the vivoXPRESS® manufacturing platform.
The vivoXPRESS® system uses fast-growing Nicotiana benthamiana plants to produce a wide range of biologic (large molecule) drugs, including monoclonal antibodies, therapeutic proteins and vaccines, at a fraction of the cost of using conventional manufacturing methods.
The KDFX line overcomes a major challenge for using plant-based systems to produce therapeutic proteins: ensuring that these products do not trigger an immune response in humans.
“The line supports production of proteins for therapeutic use which present negligible levels of potentially immunogenic plant-specific glycans on proteins such as monoclonal antibodies and other products in the PlantForm pipeline,” said Doug Cossar, PlantForm’s Vice-President, Research.
“Patent protection opens up new opportunities for PlantForm to operate using the vivoXPRESS® platform, including licensing the technology as a revenue-generating strategy and developing new advanced transgenic plant lines with attractive properties.”
About PlantForm Corporation (www.plantformcorp.com)
PlantForm Corporation is a biopharmaceutical company focused on the ultra-low-cost production of specialty antibody and protein drugs and vaccines using the proprietary vivoXPRESS® plant-based manufacturing platform. The vivoXPRESS® plant expression system reduces biologic drug production costs by as much as 90% compared to standard mammalian cell systems. The platform is fast (drug production in as little as six weeks), versatile and easily scalable. PlantForm’s pipeline features an innovative antidote to ricin exposure, and biosimilar versions of the brand name biologic drugs Keytruda® and Lucentis®. Learn more.
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For more information, please contact:
Don Stewart
President and CEO, PlantForm Corp.
don.stewart@plantformcorp.com
+1 416-452-7242
Stacey Curry Gunn
Director of Communications, PlantForm Corp.
stacey.curry.gunn@plantformcorp.com
+1 519-827-1131