Innsbruck and Geneva, 19 August 2010—Austrian BIOCRATES Life Sciences AG and Swiss Selexis SA have entered into a co-development agreement to further increase drug substance yields from mammalian cell cultures. Because most protein therapeutics require specific post-translational modifications (e.g., glycosylation) to exert their full therapeutic efficacy, mammalian cell systems have become the standard for the manufacture of most pharmaceutical recombinant proteins. The comparatively high costs of mammalian cell culture processes, coupled with their low yields, have spurred interest in the development of novel methods to optimize and boost specific productivity and titers of recombinant proteins. Wombat Capital Ltd. provided expert advisory services to BIOCRATES for this collaboration.
Selexis SA: Unique technologies for the rapid development of high-performance mammalian cell lines for research preclinical, clinical, and commercial production purposes
Swiss-based Selexis SA, a privately held biotech company, is dedicated to the development of innovative technologies and expert services that enable significant reductions in the time, effort, and costs required to develop and maintain high-performance mammalian cell lines used in the expression of pharmaceutically relevant proteins. A number of CHO cell lines developed by Selexis have already been scaled up and tested in large bioreactors (up to 1,000 liters), where they have been found to maintain the same high levels of expression seen under experimental conditions. They have been used for the generation of clinical-grade materials (up to phase II clinical trials). The yield improvement, combined with the stability of the Selexis cell lines, have been translated into increased yields in large-scale production.
BIOCRATES Life Sciences AG: Powerful metabolite panels to characterize the functional endpoints of biological events
BIOCRATES is a leading company in the field of targeted metabolomics, i.e., the study of the small molecule metabolite profile of a biological organism. Its innovative, fully integrated technology platform for metabolomics is based on mass spectrometry, enabling the systematic quantification of a wide range of biologically relevant molecule classes in a wide range of samples. Metabolomics provides a functional readout of the physiologic state of an organism as determined by the sum of its genetic blueprint, regulation, protein abundance, and environmental influences.
Metabolomics in the development of mammalian cell lines
“Our partnership with Selexis provides us with a unique opportunity to cooperate with an industry expert in cell culture development and optimization—a highly promising application of metabolomics,” said Elgar Schnegg, Chief Executive Officer of BIOCRATES. “We are confident that metabolomics will help to further fine-tune the characteristics of the high-performance cell culture systems developed by Selexis.” An opinion shared by Dr Igor Fisch, Chief Executive Officer and co-founder of Selexis, who said: “In BIOCRATES, we have found an ideal partner to further advance our cell culture development and eventually deliver to our clients optimized solutions to bring their cell culture processes from lab bench to cGMP manufacturing in record time.”
About BIOCRATES Life Sciences AG
Founded in 2002 in Innsbruck, Austria, BIOCRATES has dedicated its research activities to the youngest addition of the ‘omics’ quartet of systems biology, i.e., metabolomics, the study of the body’s small-molecule metabolites. The company’s research and development focus rests on the identification and validation of powerful biomarker panels that help identify disease risk, diagnose diseases, assess disease severity, and guide treatment and on the development of ‘companion diagnostics,’ i.e., biomarkers that help assess how a new drug works in the body and identify patients most likely to respond to a treatment.
About Selexis SA
Selexis is a privately held biotechnology company dedicated to the development of innovative technologies and expert services that enable significant time and cost savings in the development of high-performance mammalian cell lines used in the manufacture of pharmaceutically relevant proteins. The company’s core intellectual property portfolio is based on the discovery and application of novel DNA-based elements that control the dynamic organization of chromatin within all mammalian cells. Application of the Selexis technology has enabled the rapid development of high-performance cell lines for a number of pharmaceutically important programs.
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Tel.: +43/1/602 05 30-0, e-mail: michael.leitner@publichealth.at
