One-stop-shop CDMO to support manufacturing of AAV-based product targeting Alzheimer’s disease

08-Mar-2022 - Last updated on 08-Mar-2022 at 15:39 GMT

Finnish company, Biovian Oy, has been engaged by a South Korea biotechnology company to carry out process development and manufacturing of an AAV-based innovative drug candidate.

The contract development and manufacturing organization (CDMO) is partnering with ANLBIO, a company developing its miRNA-based gene therapy for neurodegenerative diseases using a proprietary adeno-associated virus (AAV) vector platform as a delivering vehicle.

ANLBIO says its novel molecule, ANL-101, which is set to is set to enter clinical trials, holds the potential to help patients with Alzheimer’s disease.

Antti Nieminen, CEO of Biovian, said the CDMO is providing ANLBIO with full process development, upscaling, and manufacturing including the establishment of QC methods for the final release of the drug product for clinical trials.

The manufacturing part of the agreement covers upscaling of the process to working volume of hundreds of liters and subsequent drug product manufacture at Biovian’s facilities in Turku, Finland.

“As a one-stop-shop CDMO, we can support ANLBIO during the eventual commercial manufacturing if needed," said the CEO.

Biovian expanded its GMP viral vector contract development and manufacturing facilities in 2020 to tackle what it saw as a bottleneck in viral vector production for gene therapies. That facility extension saw it more than double its capacity in the production of adenovirus, AAV, and lentivirus, building on over a decade of experience in the viral vector field.

Consultancy MedClaris Inc brought Biovian and ANLBIO together, said Nieminen.

“MedClaris Inc, is a South Korean bio-consultancy company that has known us for many years and could therefore recommend Biovian to ANLBIO when it was looking for a collaborator for its AAV project."

Fostering a can-do attitude

Nieminen told BioPharma-Reporter the company’s recent net promoter score (NPS) was 67, which, he said, demonstrates it has been fulfilling client's needs through its services.

NPS measures customer experience and predicts business growth.

“We also have an employee retention rate of 96% and 50% of people working at Biovian hold a master’s degree or PhD

“Biovian was founded by five co-founders and four of them are still active in the company management. These co-founders have built the company from scratch and fostered a can-do-and-happy-to-work-here attitude.

“Clients looking for a CDMO value the accumulated knowledge and friendly service that is a result of all these things.”