AbSci, Sanofi in Manufacturing Partnership

On Jan. 9, 2019, AbSci, a biotherapeutic discovery and manufacturing technology company, announced a manufacturing collaboration with Sanofi to improve two of Sanofi’s biotherapeutics.

Under the terms of the agreement, AbSci will apply its Escherichia coli (E. coli) manufacturing platform, SoluPro, and its optimization assay system, to two of Sanofi’s biotherapeutic molecules. AbSci reports that its technology platform can rapidly achieve optimized, scalable, high-quality, high-titer production of any class of biotherapeutic molecule, including traditionally difficult-to-manufacture molecules and next-generation scaffolds. The collaboration will take place at AbSci, located in Vancouver, WA, and funded by Sanofi.

During development, SoluPro can reportedly produce gram quantities of material for preliminary screenings in a matter of days instead of weeks. AbSci states that the platform has a demonstrated track record expressing difficult proteins and achieves higher protein production levels than mammalian systems, which allows scientists to access previously elusive and untestable therapeutic proteins. Once therapeutic candidates have been identified, the platform scales seamlessly for commercial production, therefore eliminating the six-to-12-month cell-line development process. By returning biomanufacturing to its E. coli roots, AbSci says it aims to replace Chinese hamster ovary cell and other mammalian expression platforms as the preferred expression host.