Aragen Bioscience licenses protein yield boosting tech for cell line development
The deal will see Aragen use the 2G UNic platform – which is designed to boost protein yield by increasing mRNA translation rates – to develop cell lines on behalf of its drug industry customers.
ProteoNic spokesman Victor Schut told us the technology combines DNA elements associated with higher translation rates and stability enhancers to increase the amount of protein produced from a single mRNA transcript.
“We incorporate our DNA elements into existing client production vectors as an improvement of those vectors and production cell lines or we supply our own complete vectors” Schut said, adding that “Both approaches result in higher recombinant protein production yields.”
Using vectors combining the translation elements and sequences encoding therapeutic proteins to create cell lines is also likely to reduce Aragen’s customers’ costs according to Schut, who confirmed that ProteoNic does not charge royalties for use of its technology.
Oren Beske, Aragen COO, was equally enthusiastic about the ProteoNic technology, based on its performance it trials.
“We have performed evaluations of ProteoNic’s 2G UNic technology for a number of products in stable and transient protein expression settings.
“To date, we have consistently obtained a significant increase in cell culture productivity. We believe that the combination of this technology and Aragen’s services will provide significant value to our current and future clients” Beske said.
The deal is the second time Aragen has added to its cell line development offering this year. In June launched a bespoke cell line development service in collaboration with Transposagen Biopharmaceuticals.
Aragen is owned by Indian contractor GVK Bio.
