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news.Altor BioScience has received a phase II small business innovation research grant from the US National Cancer Institute to support further development of its proprietary processes for making therapeutic antibodies in transgenic lettuce.
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The grant was submitted in response to President George W Bush’s executive order encouraging innovation in manufacturing and provides funding of approximately $1.2 million over a two-year period.
Altor’s long-term goal is to establish this proprietary technology as the method of choice for producing fully functional antibodies and other targeted immunotherapeutic drugs at very low manufacturing costs.
“The funding will allow us to directly compare anticancer antibodies generated using our economical lettuce-based system with those made by the current high-cost mammalian cell production methods,” said Dr Hing Wong, Altor’s president and the principal investigator of the project.
“Ultimately we feel transgenic lettuce technology could represent the breakthrough needed to make low-cost proprietary or biogeneric drugs for existing and emerging markets and stockpiled therapeutic proteins for biodefense purposes,” continued Dr Wong.