BioCina Pty Ltd., a global end-to-end biologics CDMO, announced the expansion of their partnership with GPN Vaccines Ltd.
GPN Vaccines is a biotechnology company developing a proprietary engineered whole-cell vaccine called Gamma-PNTM against Streptococcus pneumoniae. This bacterium is responsible for causing life-threatening infections such as pneumonia, bacteraemia and meningitis, each year causing up to 2 million deaths worldwide. GPN’s vaccine technology is a proprietary engineered strain of Streptococcus pneumoniae that lacks capsular polysaccharide and expresses surface proteins common to all serotypes, inducing broad-spectrum T- and B-cell immunity to cross-reactive protein antigens of the bacteria, making this vaccine outperform against currently approved vaccines.
BioCina will manufacture large-scale cGMP batches for this programme. The BioCina facility in Adelaide, Australia has a rich history of developing and manufacturing recombinant proteins in microbial systems such as E. coli.
BioCina’s chief executive officer, Mark W. Womack stated, “We are extremely proud that GPN Vaccines has asked us to further scale-up the production of Gamma-PNTM, which has the potential to protect so many lives against a broad range of serotypes not covered by any current vaccines.”
GPN Vaccines’ chairman & chief executive officer, Professor Tim Hirst said, “We are delighted to be progressing with the next stage of cGMP manufacture of our innovative whole cell pneumococcal vaccine, Gamma-PNTM, with BioCina as the CDMO of choice. They successfully optimised the manufacture of phase 1 material, and we now look forward to working with them to deliver a scaled-up process for the manufacture of phase 2 material suitable for clinical evaluation worldwide.”
BioCina is a global end-to-end biologics contract development and manufacturing organization (CDMO) of choice, offering process development and cGMP clinical & commercial manufacturing of the microbial, plasmid DNA and mRNA modalities.
GPN Vaccines is a public (unlisted) biotechnology company developing a vaccine against Streptococcus pneumoniae, which is responsible for causing life-threatening pneumonia, bacteremia, and meningitis, as well as otitis media (middle ear infections).
