Working With Us
Licensing
The Anthrocell® Expression System (ACX™) is available for licensing for both commercial and research applications, with significant advantages in both contexts.
For research applications, ACX™ is an attractive alternative to HEK, with high transfection rates enabling a stable clone within 90 days and the ability to save on the migration to CHO.
For commercial applications, the fully human PTMs provided by ACX™ offer the prospect of superior clinical outcomes and higher prospects of clinical trial success.
Competitive Edge
Anthrocell leads the biotechnology industry using a fully human expression system that more comprehensively covers a broader range of applications than any of its closest competitors.
Increasingly, not only the species-specific qualities of proteins are gaining importance (being produced by human cells) but also the tissue-specific qualities (being produced by blood cells in the case of mAbs). Anthrocell’s expression system is vastly superior to that of its competitors, guaranteeing human blood-derived identity and stability of its mAb expression.
Using a proprietary process developed in-house to produce the required proteins, the result is a much greater yield of biopharmaceutical proteins for the same culture duration. This combining with the increased effectiveness of the biopharmaceuticals produced by Anthrocell’s process means producing a dose of a given efficacy is significantly less costly than the equivalent using competing technologies, and carries a fraction of the risk of adverse side-effects.
R&D Collaborations
Organisations conducting research and development into novel mAb biopharmaceuticals or improvements to existing mAb biopharmaceuticals may benefit from collaboration with Anthrocell to extract the full potential from their efforts. Anthrocell is open to collaborating with such organisations with the aim of developing new mAb products as well as biobetters.
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Market Niches
Over the past decade, there have been two main shifts in how the pharmaceutical industry views the improvement of its R & D pipelines. Anthrocell has positioned itself to take advantage of this new market perspective.
Biologicals
In the last decade, the pharmaceutical industry started to shift its R & D pipeline from simple chemical-based compounds towards more sophisticated biologics-based compounds to address the growing need for management and treatment of complex and life-threatening diseases such as cancer, heart diseases and age-related illnesses.
The worldwide biologics market is estimated to be worth in the hundreds of billions of dollars. Not only is the number of biologics expanding, but the size of acquisitions is also growing with more cash offered up front.
Novel Expression Systems
The second significant industry shift relates to the need for improved expression systems when dealing with biologics. Biological products require living organisms to produce them. For the last 30 years nearly all biotherapeutic products were manufactured using three “classic” expression systems – E. coli (bacterial), yeast and CHO (mammalian). More importantly, mAbs could only be manufactured by using mammalian systems, with CHO cells representing 74 per cent of current mAbs on the market.
Many companies have ‘failed’ products on the shelves that could and should be made more efficiently and to higher clinical standards in newer expression systems. With glycoproteins manufactured in mammalian cell culture in particular, the use of different host cells and associated expression systems results in products with different glycosylation and other structural properties, pharmacological activity and toxicity, including immunogenicity.
Anthrocell’s Unique Proposition
Anthrocell’s technology overcomes most of the above-stated difficulties through the use of a human cell-based expression system. Our research has paved the way for high yield production of fully human mAbs. The glycosylation and other structural properties, pharmacological activity and immunogenicity of mAbs produced by our system correspond with those found naturally in our bodies, and thus toxicity becomes a relatively rare complication.
Of particular importance, correct glycosylation of mAbs is largely responsible for eliciting ADCC, which causes cells from the patient’s own immune system to be recruited to destroy cancer cells. In many instances this means that “cancer-slowing” mAbs acquire “cancer-killing” properties when produced using Anthrocell’s technology.