GreenLight Biosciences Celebrates Manufacturing Milestone For Covid-19 Booster Candidate – Endpoints News

August 4, 2022 12:13 PM EDTUpdated 12:38 PM

It was late last year when the biotech Green­Light Bio­sciences inked a deal with CD­MO gi­ant Sam­sung Bi­o­log­ics to man­u­fac­ture its mR­NA Covid-19 vac­cine. Now, as Sam­sung pumps more mon­ey in­to its biotech and CD­MO op­er­a­tions, the South Ko­re­an com­pa­ny has com­plet­ed the first com­mer­cial-scale en­gi­neer­ing run for Green­Light’s Covid-19 vac­cine boost­er can­di­date.

Ac­cord­ing to Sam­sung Bi­o­log­ics, Green­Light’s syn­the­sis re­ac­tion had a titer of 12g/L at a com­mer­cial scale and pro­duced 650g of mR­NA. On the back of this test, Green­Light’s Covid boost­er is ex­pect­ed to have da­ta lat­er this year, with man­u­fac­tur­ing at a com­mer­cial scale start­ing soon af­ter.

In an in­ter­view with End­points News, Green­Light CEO An­drey Zarur said the com­pa­ny can it­er­ate its mR­NA plat­form to pro­duce hun­dreds of mR­NA species. That’s been ben­e­fi­cial in its orig­i­nal agri­cul­tur­al busi­ness and is now be­ing ap­plied to its vac­cine can­di­date. Zarur said the plat­form al­lows the com­pa­ny to ad­just and up­date the vac­cine in­stead of stick­ing with a cer­tain spike pro­tein.

“The beau­ty of our plat­form is that once we have that we have en­sured that what­ev­er the lead­ing can­di­date is that we liked at that mi­cro­scop­ic scale is ful­ly scal­able to pro­duce hun­dreds of mil­lions of dos­es very rapid­ly,” he aid. “So, the val­ue of the man­u­fac­tur­ing plat­form it­self gets am­pli­fied, if you will, by the fact that we have this up­stream dis­cov­ery en­gine.”

As for the first en­gi­neer­ing run, Zarur said it went ex­act­ly as planned, adding that the com­pa­ny now has a high-pro­duc­tiv­i­ty process that can run at a mi­cro­gram scale, a gram scale, a 10-gram scale, and now a mul­ti-100-gram scale.

The over­all tech­nol­o­gy trans­fer and scale-up from the lab to Sam­sung’s com­mer­cial fa­cil­i­ty were com­plet­ed in sev­en months, but ac­cord­ing to Zarur, Green­Light’s man­age­ment team has worked with Sam­sung for years — and that last­ing col­lab­o­ra­tion was key in get­ting the process up and run­ning.

“We are in con­ver­sa­tions with sev­er­al oth­er com­pa­nies in terms of oth­ers us­ing our plat­form to man­u­fac­ture their prod­uct. In terms of our part­ner for large scale clin­i­cal and com­mer­cial, right now we’re on­ly talk­ing to Sam­sung,” he said.

Green­Light al­so struck up oth­er part­ner­ships to cre­ate mR­NA vac­cines for oth­er dis­eases. In March, the Serum In­sti­tute of In­dia inked a deal with the biotech to joint­ly de­sign three mR­NA prod­ucts, in­clud­ing a shin­gles vac­cine, for de­vel­op­ment and even­tu­al man­u­fac­tur­ing and com­mer­cial­iza­tion.

While the de­vel­op­ment of the boost­er con­tin­ues, Zarur hopes to have a clin­i­cal study done by the end of the year and have da­ta by ear­ly next year. Zarur al­so plans to work with reg­u­la­to­ry bod­ies in Africa to start a clin­i­cal study on the con­ti­nent as vac­ci­na­tion rates re­main low.

“We are cur­rent­ly ne­go­ti­at­ing with a num­ber of reg­u­la­to­ry au­thor­i­ties in Africa to ini­ti­ate those clin­i­cal stud­ies in Africa. We have re­leased a GMP batch and so we’re re­al­ly just go­ing through the de­tails of the pro­to­col,” he said.

As far as the fu­ture with Sam­sung, Zarur said they have dis­cussed us­ing the plat­form in dif­fer­ent ca­pac­i­ties, main­ly to pro­vide ac­cess to oth­ers who are de­sign­ing nov­el mR­NA ap­proach­es as well as pro­vide greater scal­a­bil­i­ty.

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August 1, 2022 06:00 AM EDT

The field of gene therapy has been diligently moving forward over the past several decades to bring potentially life-saving treatments to patients with genetic diseases. In addition to two approved adeno-associated viral (AAV) gene therapies, there are more than 250 AAV gene therapies in various clinical trial stages.1 AAV vectors remain the most frequently used vector for delivering therapeutic transgenes to target tissues due to their demonstrated and lasting clinical efficacy and extensive safety track record. As AAV therapies advance through clinical trials and into commercialization, many biotech companies are turning to contract development and manufacturing organizations (CDMOs) to prepare their programs for late-stage clinical and commercial scale manufacturing. Given the scope and scale of the manufacturing needs that will accompany regulatory approvals for these assets, CDMOs continue to expand their capacity to meet the needs of increasing prevalent patient populations. However, despite rapid growth, projected gene therapy manufacturing demands still outpace the collective capacity of the CDMO industry.

August 3, 2022 07:00 AM EDTUpdated 07:40 AM

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Shares of the big biotech soared 46% ahead of the bell, after starting the day with a market cap of $17 billion.

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August 4, 2022 08:00 AM EDTUpdated 09:34 AM

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August 4, 2022 12:30 PM EDT

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August 3, 2022 12:13 PM EDT

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August 4, 2022 07:28 AM EDTUpdated 08:49 AM

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August 3, 2022 03:02 PM EDTUpdated 03:38 PM

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August 3, 2022 02:17 PM EDTUpdated 03:52 PM

As Moderna prepares two bivalent variant-specific Covid-19 boosters for delivery in the fall and looks into a potential monkeypox program, CEO Stéphane Bancel stressed on the Q2 call that “now is not the time to slow down.”

The company’s stock $MRNA soared more than 15% Wednesday morning, after Bancel reported a strong quarter and a new $3 billion share buyback plan. Covid sales took a dip compared to last quarter, coming in at $4.5 billion as opposed to $5.9 billion in Q1.