Making life-saving antibody medicine more affordable
PlantForm Corporation was formed in 2008 to commercialize a plant-based manufacturing platform for low-cost monoclonal antibody drugs that target cancer and other critical illnesses.
The company’s technology platform, using fast-growing tobacco plants, provides several advantages over the mammalian and other fermentation systems used to produce most antibody drugs on the market today: it’s fast, efficient, highly versatile (for new product development) and readily scalable. Best of all, it’s capable of reducing manufacturing costs for these life-saving drugs by up to 90 per cent.
PlantForm licenses its technology from the University of Guelph, where it was developed by Dr. J. Christopher Hall, the Canada Research Chair in Recombinant Antibody Technology. Dr. Hall is a PlantForm founder and the company’s Chief Scientific Officer. All relevant intellectual property is protected by patent filings.
The company’s first product will be plant-produced version of the breast cancer drug Herceptin®, the brand name for trastuzumab. In Canada, “generic” versions of brand-name biologic drugs are categorized as subsequent-entry biologics (SEBs), also known in other jurisdictions as biosimilars or follow-on biologics.
Proof-of-principle lab studies, published in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, show PlantForm’s SEB trastuzumab has equivalent purity and activity compared to Herceptin®. Animal studies are now under way and are anticipated to be complete in early 2012, to be followed by human clinical trials.
Herceptin® had global sales of $6 billion in 2010, and its patents begin to expire in 2014. PlantForm aims to launch SEB trastuzumab, in partnership with a pharmaceutical company, in world markets, beginning in Europe in the 2015 to 2016 timeframe. PlantForm management estimates the market potential for SEB trastuzumab is $2 billion a year by 2016 and $4 billion to $5 billion a year by 2019.
PlantForm will also produce SEB versions of other antibody drugs that, together with Herceptin®, are forecast to have combined annual global sales of $40 billion by 2013.
PlantForm’s projected revenue is more than $50 million by 2016. The company has offices in Guelph (headquarters), Toronto and Sarnia.
An expert panel of Canadian and U.S. venture capitalists selected PlantForm as a leading investment opportunity and winner in the life sciences category of Canada's Top 10™ Competition in 2008-09 and 2010.
PlantForm was also a finalist for the Ontario Centres of Excellence 2011 Mind to Market Award.