InVitria develops animal-free recombinant supplements
With financial support from the US National Institutes of Health
InVitria has successfully completed a two-year research project for which it received a $725,000 Phase II, Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant from the US National Institutes of Health (NIH).
The project aimed to broaden the applications for InVitria’s recombinant human serum albumin product Cellastim.
US-based InVitria, a division of Ventria Bioscience, is the developer of the ExpressTec biomanufacturing system, which is said to be the first biomanufacturing system to commercialise recombinant protein manufacturing using plants as the host.
The firm’s product line consists of animal-free cell culture media supplements and reagents that are distributed globally.
‘Several leading biopharmaceutical and cell culture media customers have incorporated InVitria’s recombinant human serum albumin based on the research we performed under this NIH grant,’ said Ning Huang, vice president, Research and Development and Principal Investigator for the NIH grant award.
‘There is a strong push from regulators and biopharmaceutical companies to remove serum and animal components from biopharmaceutical manufacturing. The challenge is to maintain cell growth and performance at the same time and Cellastim makes this possible.’
In addition to safety concerns, animal components frequently have high batch-to-batch variation, which leads to unpredictable manufacturing results. InVitria’s recombinant, animal-free supplements support the removal of animal components while maintaining biomanufacturing productivity.
Cellastim is the third InVitria product to be manufactured using cGMP quality standards for manufacturing.
