Avecia Biologics launches biotherapeutic protein production technology

Avecia has launched pAVEway - new technology enabling (>10g/L) microbial production of therapeutically useful proteins such as vaccines, cytokines and growth factors. The technology will help reduce the time to market and cost, while increasing flexibility, says Avecia

Achieving high levels of active protein during fermentation is often a bottleneck in the development of an efficient production process. The choice of expression system, host strain and fermentation conditions, has a profound effect on the overall quantity and quality of protein produced.

Consequently, it has a major impact on the success of scale-up from r&d to large scale cGMP manufacturing, and ultimately on the cost of goods (CoG). Selection of the most appropriate and regulatory compliant production system for biopharmaceutical target proteins can be an empirical and time-consuming approach. This can ultimately increase the time to market.

A specialist in the process development and manufacture of biologics, Avecia Biologics offers proprietary expression and gene manipulation systems for microbial- and mammalian-derived biopharmaceuticals.

Avecia's scientists have used their expertise and understanding of the expression kinetics of existing state-of-the-art microbial systems to design and build a range of innovative expression vectors, to select a range of suitable host cells and to optimise the fermentation processes. These systems are combined in the pAVEway platform, which offers a way for fast track process creation and development.

Among the notable features of the platform are the fully repressible basic expression and the modulatable expression induction. This enables the high level expression of a wider range of proteins than ever before.

Dr Mark Carver, chief scientific officer at Avecia Biologics, said: 'PAVEway offers a highly versatile platform, including a solution for E.coli - the most widely used microbial expression host - and Pseudomonas.' The The technology provides maximum flexibility when making the critical decision on the choice of expression system and offers significant benefits in reducing process development times and costs while achieving high titre and quality, he added.

The company has cGMP manufacturing in the North East of the UK for recombinant protein biologics offering flexible capacity from 100L - 5000L for all stages of the product pipeline.