Science & Technology
PlantForm's proprietary technology platform turns fast-growing tobacco plants into bioreactors for monoclonal antibodies, protein drugs and vaccines.
The technology — protected with patent filings — is licensed from the University of Guelph, where it was developed by Dr. J. Christopher Hall, the Canada Research Chair in Recombinant Antibody Technology. The benefits of our technology include:
Dr. Hall's unique "plug and play" cloning system uses DNA cassettes that contain all the necessary elements to produce a desired antibody in a quick and efficient manner.
These cassettes contain constant regions (common components) that have been derived from a variety of therapeutic antibodies. This system is designed so that elements that distinguish one antibody from another (the variable regions) may be dropped into the cassettes, making the complete DNAs required to produce a desired antibody. This proprietary methodology, which exploits well-understood techniques in molecular cloning, is designed to use a minimum number of steps for speed and accuracy. The exploitation of common constant regions for multiple products allows rapid production and safety evaluation for a pipeline of different therapeutic antibodies.
Traditional methods of producing drugs in plants can take several years to produce enough seeds for commercial scale production. PlantForm has dramatically reduced its product development timeline by using a transient expression system licensed from Bayer Innovation GmbH. After the genetic material is introduced, target protein production occurs immediately and peaks within one to two weeks, after which the plants can be harvested for product purification.
PlantForm's production platform results in therapeutic antibodies that lack plant-specific glycosylations. Plants naturally glycosylate proteins with sugars that are different from the sugars mammalian systems use, which could make plant-produced antibodies immunogenic to patients after repeated use. Removing these plant-specific sugars reduces the risk of immunogenicity.