Under the terms of agreement, Promosome has granted GE Healthcare exclusive rights for the technologies and will receive milestone payments for technology transfer and subsequent royalties upon commercialization.
Mammalian cell culture plays a key role in the manufacture of biotherapeutic proteins for the treatment of diseases such as cancer and rheumatoid arthritis, as well as the new generation of vaccines.
Promosome’s technology suite, which is comprised of three complementary elements for optimizing protein translation, has been developed through their work with the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla California, GE spokeswoman Val Jones told BioPharma-Reporter.com.
“The core of the technologies being licensed by GE from Promosome is based on a novel method of controlling ribosomal binding and translation,” Jones said.
“Promosome’s technologies will enable us to expand our offering for the biopharmaceutical industry with a cell-line generation service focused on delivering increased expression levels for hard-to-manufacture therapeutic proteins and improving manufacturing efficiency through increased protein yields,” Jones explained.
“While we’re not able to put specific figures yet on the potential for increased yields, we know yield and increasing manufacturing efficiency is a key industry issue for our customers. Promosome’s technologies also have the potential to enable the manufacture of therapeutic proteins with expression levels currently too low to be viable as a commercially available therapeutic.”
Start-to-Finish
The Promosome cell lines add to GE’s range of start-to-finish technologies and services for the biopharmaceutical manufacturing industry.
“In addition to our technologies for protein purification, cell culture technologies WAVE and Xcellerex bioreactors, and the recent acquisition of HyClone cell culture media, there’s a clear synergy as we develop and expand our start to finish manufacturing footprint,” Jones added.
John Manzello, President and CEO of Promosome, added: “This agreement represents a significant commercial milestone for Promosome. We are excited to be working closely with the team at GE Healthcare to transfer our technology to their in-house experts. GE Healthcare is ideally positioned to deliver our technology to the global biopharmaceutical industry.”
In addition to the recent acquisition of Thermo Fisher’s HyClone cell culture media and sera, GE has launched an automated protein purification system, and began work building a disposable biopharma facility for JHL Biotech in China.