PLANT-BASED EXPRESSION PLATFORM

The production of therapeutic proteins is a billion dollar industry and AzarGen’s expression platform will enable the production of therapeutically superior proteins at a significantly reduced cost.

Compared to current production systems (mammalian, yeast and bacterial), the use of plant cells to express human recombinant proteins offer greater advantages with regard to:

  • Safety - no immunogenic responses or animal/bacterial-derived contamination.
  • Complexity - plants are higher organisms with protein assembly mechanisms similar to humans, which can synthesize complex biopharmaceutical proteins (unlike bacterial fermentation systems that lack post-translational modification processes).
  • Cost and scalability - plant-based systems allow for significantly lower facility and production costs (compared to mammalian cell-based systems) and production can easily be scaled up to accommodate increased demands.

TECHNOLOGY

We have successfully generated tobacco plants expressing different isoforms of a protein candidate using conventional promoter constructs.

However, there are several challenges that include low yield, gene silencing and purification that we aim to address in the current product development
phase:

  • Design, construct and test synthetic promoters for high-level expression using reporter gene assays.
  • Construct a range of plant expression cassettes containing combinations of synthetic promoter, signalling and purification elements, combined with therapeutic candidate cDNA and reporter gene fusions.
  • Establish transgenic tobacco lines expressing the current target protein.
  • Develop a protocol for purification of the target protein from tobacco plants.

We envisage developing a new plant-based expression technology with synthetic components conferring high-level and/or targeted expression and simplified purification of biologically active human protein.