Medicago USA receives second milestone payment of $3.8m
Under DARPA contract to build plant-made VLP vaccine facility
Medicago USA, a subsidiary of Canadian biotechnology firm Medicago, has received a second milestone payment of US$3.8m under a Technology Investment Agreement signed last year with the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
The payment is part of a $21m DARPA grant awarded to Medicago to develop a 90,000ft2 cGMP facility in Research Triangle Park (RTP), North Carolina.
The plant, currently under construction, is intended to demonstrate the scalable manufacturing of Medicago’s plant-expressed VLP vaccines in the US. It is expected to have the capacity to produce 10 million doses per month of influenza vaccines with potential for future expansion.
Medicago has received $10.7m to date towards this project.
‘The ability to build a state-of-the-art vaccine facility in just one year requires a great technology, solving novel engineering problems, and a solid team,’ said Mike Wanner, vp US operations of Medicago USA. ‘We have met all milestones to date and our US vaccine facility is projected to be operational during the second half of 2011.’
The firm is developing VLP vaccines to protect against pandemic and seasonal flu using a transient expression system, which produces recombinant vaccine antigens in non-transgenic plants. The technology is said to be faster and cheaper than conventional egg and cell-based technologies.
This DARPA project is part of the Blue Angel influenza vaccine rapid response demonstration study, which seeks to identify new ways to produce large amounts of high quality vaccine grade protein in less than three months in response to emerging and novel biologic threats.
