BioSante Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (NASDAQ: BPAX) today announced that results of an evaluation of its 2A/Furin technology by Novartis Pharma AG in its industrial antibody CHO expression system were published in the Journal of Applied Microbiology & Biotechnology. The results demonstrate that the 2A/Furin technology was integrated successfully into a plasmid-based, industrial-scale, CHO antibody cell line development process, with minimal optimization required. Use of 2A/Furin could enhance further the distribution of high-expressing clones, improve the average productivity of clones, while also improving the stability of high producer cell lines generated using this animal-free CHO antibody development platform.
“We are pleased by the results published by Novartis”
"We are pleased by the results published by Novartis," said Stephen M. Simes, president & CEO of BioSante. "These results are third party-generated support for the value of our 2A/Furin technology. Our objective with this technology is to maximize its value to our stockholders. To this end, on April 26, 2010, we announced entering an Option Agreement with an undisclosed large multi-national pharmaceutical company to obtain a non-exclusive worldwide license for the use of BioSante's 2A/Furin technology in the expression of antibodies, and we continue to work toward additional non-exclusive licenses. The market for antibody products in 2008 was approximately $31 billion and growing."
The 2A/Furin technology rapidly generates cell lines that express levels of antibodies suitable for commercial production in a matter of weeks, compared to months for current techniques, which gives the potential to dramatically reduce the costs required to generate commercial antibodies. This technology allows for high-level, equimolar expression of two coding sequences using a single promoter that is applicable for generating expression vectors for in vivo gene therapy applications, pre-clinical target validation and lead identification as well as to rapidly generate high producer antibody cell lines that produce, in vitro, high levels of mature antibody without requiring any amplification currently employed in antibody expression systems.
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