ARTES and Burnet Institute publish data on production and immunogenicity of malaria transmission-blocking vaccine candidates
ARTES Biotechnology and Burnet Institute recently published data on the efficient production of malaria vaccine candidates using virus-like particles (VLP) presenting malaria transmission-stage antigens, which were capable of inducing transmission-blocking antibodies.
ARTES attends BioEurope Spring 2019
Meet us at the Bio-Europe Spring 2018 taking place in Vienna, Austria March 25 -27. Volker Jenzelewski, Director Technology at ARTES, will be present in the One-on-One Partnering presenting ARTES’ innovative range of cell line and process development solutions for bio-pharmaceutical and vaccine products.
SplitCore – the latest milestone in ARTES´ vaccine development offer
ARTES Biotechnology announces the acquisition of the unique SplitCore technology developed by scientists at the University of Freiburg, Germany.
ARTES and Minapharm joint forces
ARTES Biotechnology GmbH, Germany, and Minapharm Pharmaceuticals and Chemical Industries S.A.E., Egypt, jointly announced today the formation of a new strategic business pact, offering packet solution for biopharmaceutical processes .
Aim of this new strategic business cooperation is to jointly out-license combinations of ARTES’ and Minapharm’s respective proprietary technologies and products to third parties worldwide. Both partners own and control technologies for microbial and mammalian recombinant cell lines, processes and products.
The already existing and established partnership among the companies bases on a successful, long lasting business relationship. In this, ARTES acts as specialist for microbial cell line and process development for recombinant proteins and Minapharm on the other hand is the major player for production and marketing of bio-pharmaceuticals in the MENA region.
“With the combination of ARTES’ and Minapharm’s business intelligence and service solutions future clients will benefit from our latest, innovative developments ”, Dr. Michael Piontek, Managing director of ARTES stated, “and will get robust, proven manufacturing experience and product registration.” Proven safety and efficacy of products will team up with high yield and low cost manufacturing technology.
“The established alliance with ARTES continuously confirms Minapharm’s position as a regional biotech leader. Our emergence as such contributes to a radical shift in both innovation and affordability of biopharmaceuticals as a function of time. We have been able to demonstrate the viability of our strategy to offer patients in the developing world with a timely benefit of novel therapeutic proteins. Our biopharmaceutical pipeline portfolio reflects great potential to expand our strategy and offers solutions for the management of medical emergencies. We are glad that ARTES is sharing our vision” said Frank Mueller, Senior Manager Biopharmaceutical Projects of Minapharm.
ARTES successfully completed EU funded project Plurivax
ARTES Biotechnology explored very effective in a SME consortium vaccine developments for veterinary applications.
Under the titel: “ERA-Net EuroTransBio-8: PLURIVAX, development of a virus-like-particle (VLP) based vaccine platform and stable formulation especially suited for the veterinary applications, the EU cooperation was part of the 8th EuroTransBio call and was funded in the time period from June 2014 to November 2017 by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and the Flanders (Belgium) agency for Innovation by Science and Technology (IWT).
For the development of vaccines for human applications it is state of the art to use virus-like particles (VLPs) as a vehicle. The use of these particles has the advantage that they as such not being infectious but that they transport foreign antigens in an ideal way to the immune system. These very effective and simple mechanism was the backbone of the PLURIVAX project.
“As initial nucleus our proprietary VLP platform METAVAX® was taken. This platform has already been applied to the development of adjuvant-free vaccine candidates against different human relating diseases like flu, malaria and HIV”, Michael Piontek, managing director of ARTES stated. “Our expression host, the methylotrophic yeast Hansenula polymorpha, is the preferred technology for affordable mass vaccination and is recommended by the WHO for mass vaccinations. Combination of our both platforms build an excellent approach to low-cost mass production of safe and effective vaccines.”
ARTES chose eight different, large molecular weight antigens derived from four animal‑ infecting viruses. The bovine viral diarrhea virus (BVDV) as an important pathogen of cattle, also infecting sheep and pigs. The classical swine fever virus (CSFV), which is acknowledged as a global threat for swine and is listed as notifiable animal diseases by the World Organization for Animal Health. The feline leukemia virus (FeLV) as a retrovirus threatening domestic cats and the west nile virus (WNV) which is a mosquito vector transmitted zoonotic virus of the Flaviviridae family. WNV circulates in birds as natural hosts but can be transmitted to mammals including humans causing west nile fever.
First results were released in a scientific paper under the title “Establishment of a yeast-based VLP platform for antigen presentation” (Wetzel et al. Microb Cell Fact (2018) 17:17 )
and more information could be get on https://doi.org/10.1186/s12934-018-0868-0
Future steps are, that in close discussions with global veterinary vaccine manufacturer, ARTES’ explores the commercial application of the results and of the platform in general.