ARTES Biotechnology, specialized in microbial cell line and process development for the pharmaceutical industry recently expanded its service portfolio and supplied samples for preclinical testing to a first client.

“With the new equipped pilot plant for production of nonGMP material, we are now in the position to provide our clients with high quality preclinical test material in gram amounts”, Michael Weniger Head of Process Development at ARTES stated. “Thanks to our existing experience, installation of the plant at ARTES, implementation of a new process and supply of a batch have been managed within three months. The challenge in this kind of fast track projects is very often to meet a high quality standard”, Weniger pointed out.

 

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Under the title:” development of a virus-like-particle (VLP) based vaccine platform and stable formulation especially suited for the veterinary applications”, in short “Plurivax”, the EU cooperation is part of the recent 8th EuroTransBio call and will be funded for a three year period supported by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and the Flanders (Belgium) agency for Innovation by Science and Technology (IWT).

The intent of “Plurivax” is to develop a stable production platform and an adapted high-quality process to have an effective and usable integrated best practice suitable for several veterinary vaccines.The platform resulting from this project will be the first of its kind in veterinary application and thus opens access to a huge market. A robust, inexpensive vaccine will reduce the need for antibiotic treatment of food animals, thereby directly reducing production costs and improving quality of life for the food animal itself and for the consumer.

“ARTES VLP platform METAVAX® has already been applied to the development of adjuvant-free vaccines against different diseases like avian and swine flu, malaria and HIV. Our yeast expression host Hansenula is the preferred technology for affordable mass vaccination and is recommended by the WHO for mass vaccinations. Together, our platforms build an excellent approach to low-cost mass production of safe and effective vaccines”, Michael Piontek, Managing Director of ARTES.

Annie Van Broekhoven, CEO Q-Biologicals comments: “We will employ our know-how and expertise in the field of bioprocess development, manufacturing and formulation of recombinant antigens to develop a robust production process for VLP based vaccines. We are confident that we will succeed in shortening the process development times considerably, and in doing so drive down development costs and support rapid market introduction.”

“We will contribute our tailor made but competitively priced platform purification process to this cost sensitive production processes. Our proprietary chromatography phase technology, already being used for purification of commercial biopharmaceuticals and small molecule APIs, allows specific binding of target molecules and can be transferred to almost every chromatographic carrier substrate”, Peter Kallien, CFO of instrAction.

ARTES Biotechnology has entered into a strategic collaboration with a subsidiary of Sun Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd, an international specialty pharmaceutical company with a diversified product portfolio headquartered in Mumbai/India.

This step broadens ARTES’ international client base and demonstrates its ability to attract blue chip pharmaceutical companies. Under the collaboration agreement, ARTES will be responsible to deliver top-class cell lines and production processes for several pharmaceutical targets.

As part of the strategic collaboration, Sun Pharma’s subsidiary will also become a minority shareholder in ARTES.

ARTES Biotechnology GmbH is part of the international consortium

While the oil is slowly but surely running out, renewable resources are becoming increasingly important. In future, the biological production of raw materials has to play an even greater role to meet the needs in an environmentally friendly manner. An international consortium of researchers and companies now rises to this challenge. Its goal is the biotechnological production of so-called chitosans, which are used as raw materials for medicine, agriculture, water treatment, cosmetics, paper and textile industries as well as many other fields of application. To tap this potential, the European Commission supports the research project “Nano3Bio” with a total of almost 9 million Euros up to 2017. In addition to the experts from ARTES, universities and research institutes as well as companies from Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, India, The Netherlands, Spain and Sweden are involved. They recently met to kick off the project in Münster, Germany.

“The Nano3Bio project is making a scientific dream come true, because this strong consortium will be able to achieve a breakthrough from basic research to the biotechnological production of chitosans”, says Professor Dr. Bruno Moerschbacher, biologist at the University of Münster and coordinator of the project.