PlantForm, University of Calgary research collaboration awarded NSERC Engage Grant
Project will apply CRISPR technology to plant-made pharmaceutical production
GUELPH, Ont., May 19, 2015—A research partnership between PlantForm Corporation and a top University of Calgary scientist has been awarded an Engage Grant from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada.
The funding will allow Dr. Dae-Kyun Ro, a Tier II Canada Research Chair in Plant Bioproducts at the University of Calgary, to assess the potential for CRISPR (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats) technology to improve tobacco-plant production of therapeutic proteins.
“PlantForm is a leader in advancing low-cost plant technology for the production of important biologic medicines, and we look forward to collaborating with Dr. Ro to explore the potential of CRISPR technology to further strengthen our intellectual property portfolio,” said Dr. Don Stewart, PlantForm’s President and CEO.
“Recent progress in CRISPR technology enables us to precisely remove undesirable genes in the plant genome,” said Dr. Ro. “It is timely to use CRISPR to customize the tobacco genome for the production of higher quality recombinant proteins.”
PlantForm is a Canadian biotech company with a low-cost proprietary manufacturing platform for a wide range of plant-made pharmaceuticals, including monoclonal antibodies, therapeutic proteins and vaccines for the treatment of cancer, HIV/AIDS, Ebola and other life-threatening illnesses. The company’s vivoXPRESS™ technology uses genetically modified tobacco plants to ‘grow’ biopharmaceuticals in fully contained greenhouse environments, while significantly lowering the cost of goods compared to industry standard fermentation systems for biopharmaceutical production. Learn more.
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