Partnerships responding to the global COVID-19 crisis
St-Pacôme, Quebec, Canada — April 9th, 2020
INNO-3B, along with partners PlantForm Corporation, Cape Bio Pharms and Biopterre, has entered the race to contribute solving the global COVID-19 crisis using its next-generation vertical farming platform in a joint effort with plant-based pharmaceutical companies.
INNO-3B plans to build and operate a pilot molecular farm at its 35,000 sq. ft facility located in St-Pacôme, QC. This facility will enable collaborative effort with PlantForm along with other international partners in developing a monoclonal antibody treatment for COVID-19 patients and prophylactic applications for first responders and other health-care personnel who require immediate protection.
Production time for of the drugs will be greatly shortened through the combination of INNO-3B’s closed environment production platform and PlantForm’s proprietary biopharmaceutical manufacturing platform. This initiative will also allow the scientific community to accelerate the time to market of other plant-based solutions as a response to the current and future pandemic. Production dedicated to initial clinical trials will begin in July 2020.
This joint effort will allow the production of approximately 4,000 doses per week of the target therapeutic antibodies for COVID-19. The facility will have the capacity to produce up to 400,000 doses per week for other pharmaceuticals.
Over the last years, INNO-3B has been developing a tailored solution for plant-based pharmaceutical companies using strains of the tobacco plant. Plant-based molecular farming for protein production offer several advantages over the more traditional fermentation systems using animal or bacterial cells to produce drugs, including lower cost, improved scalability and faster turnaround times.
INNO-3B’s closed-environment production equipment offers a turnkey solution that creates optimal plant growth conditions to pharmaceutical industry standards for consistency, repeatability, traceability and full scalability throughout the growth and materials handling cycles.
“Given what is happening in the world, it is a critical time for corporations around the world to join their efforts and collaborate. INNO-3B team members are currently doing everything they can to bring organizations and individuals together to contribute to finding a solution for this global challenge. The response we are getting is just humbling. The commitment and dedication of individuals like Dr Markus Sack in Germany, Dr Doug Cossar in Ontario, Belinda Shaw in South Africa and many others is a true inspiration for us, and we are determined to support them. Speed and efficiency are of the essence right now.”
— Martin Brault — CEO, INNO-3B.
About INNO-3B (www.inno-3b.com):
INNO-3B is a Quebec-based vertical farming equipment design company that has over the last year been developing a turnkey solution for plant-based pharmaceutical companies. The solution involves our closed environment production tower that has been specifically tailored to growing Nicotiana benthamiana, with automation for materials handling, traceability of crop units and uniformity of environmental conditions for light and temperature, which will allow for consistency in plant growth.
About PlantForm Corporation (www.plantformcorp.com)
PlantForm Corporation is a biopharmaceutical company focused on the rapid development and production of biosimilar and specialty antibodies and proteins using the company’s proprietary vivoXPRESS® platform. The plant-based vivoXPRESS® system makes it easier, faster and less expensive to produce biologics for approved and novel indications. PlantForm has an expanding portfolio of patents in seven families to protect both the core platform technology and products in development.
About CapeBio Pharms (www.capebiopharms.com)
Cape Bio Pharms is a spin-off company of the University of Cape Town, Africa’s leading University. We use our disruptive plant-based expression platform to produce a range of recombinant proteins for life scientists in bio medical research. Our response to COVID-19 has been to develop a package of SARS-COV-2 Spike Proteins, critical for rapid diagnostic test kits and collaborate with other plant-based platforms to increase production capacity world-wide.
About Biopterre (www.biopterre.com)
Biopterre’s mission is as follows: “Through innovation, increase the competitiveness of companies in the bioresource field and, consequently, contribute to regional development.” As a college center for technology transfer, Biopterre offers applied research and technology transfer, technical assistance and information services. It operates in the field of bioresources.
For more information, please contact
Andrew Matthews at amatthews@inno-3b.com or +1.613.808.2633.