Medicago to develop vaccine facility in North Carolina
Company awarded $21m from the US Department of Defense
Medicago USA, a clinical-stage biotechnology company focused on developing highly effective and affordable vaccines based on proprietary manufacturing technologies and Virus-Like Particles (VLPs), has been awarded a US$21m (€16.3m) grant from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Broad Agency Announcement (BAA), Defense Sciences Research & Technology to demonstrate the scalable manufacturing of its plant-expressed VLP vaccines in the US under a Technology Investment Agreement.
Medicago will develop a 90,000ft2 cGMP facility in Research Triangle Park (RTP), North Carolina. This state-of-the-art facility will be a large, cost-effective and scaled-up facility for Medicago's VLP plant-based vaccine technology for the delivery of cGMP-grade vaccine. Medicago will scale-up and automate its cGMP process to demonstrate its capacity to produce 10 million doses/month of influenza vaccines with the potential for further expansion in the future.
This DARPA project is an accelerated and integrated effort to deliver effective production of pandemic influenza vaccine in the US. The Accelerated Manufacture of Pharmaceuticals (AMP) program seeks to identify new ways to produce large amounts of high quality vaccine protein in less than three months in response to emerging and novel biologic threats. The strategic collaboration is a $42m (€32.6m)project in which DARPA contributes $21m (€16.3m), Medicago $7.5m (€5.8m) and Alexandria Real Estate Equities $13.5m (€10.5m).
‘We are thrilled to be awarded such significant funding from DARPA for the development of a state-of-the-art plant-based VLP vaccine capability as it further validates the growing and strategic interest in our rapid and cost-effective vaccine technology,’ said Andy Sheldon, president and ceo of Medicago. ‘ We will now have a US facility ready to participate in the $7bn (€5bn) pandemic and seasonal influenza markets.’
During the recent H1N1 influenza outbreak, Medicago's rapid plant-based VLP vaccine technology was able to successfully develop a vaccine candidate in less than a month after identifying the H1N1 strain and is therefore one of the few technologies that can provide a solution in the case of a pandemic, the company says.