LenioBio and Fraunhofer Institute to develop protein expression platform

LenioBio is said to be targeting developments that require Fraunhofer’s cell-free protein production technology, as it fits a wide range of their work.

Stefan Schillberg of the Fraunhofer Institute told us, “We developed a cell-free system for production of proteins based on tobacco cells. This has been further improved with the help of Dow Agro Biosciences, and now, LenioBio will commercialize this expression platform.”​

With the addition of Fraunhofer technology, LenioBio will be able to extend its patent family covering cell-free systems and launch the ALiCE system. The system will target protein developers. This system will also use the patents from their licensing agreement with Dow AgroSciences, mentioned by Schillberg.

Hakon Birgisson, CCO of LenioBio, told us “DowAgroSciences has a lot of the patents in regards of this technology, and we have received a license from them in March of this year. Flaunhofer had some important patents that we need for the technology, to commercialize the technology, and that is what we’re finalizing now.”​

The technology created by Fraunhofer, the Vector system, part of the licensing agreement has been optimized for protein expression production, leading to an increase in the productivity of the system, said Schillberg.

With the technology patents from Fraunhofer and DowAgroSciences, LenioBio is able to create and commercialize ALiCE for the kit market. According to Birgisson, the kit market is worth $160m based on a report made by precision market research.

“We believe this [ALiCE kit] will make life much easier for protein scientists. Now you can get much higher amounts of protein than you could before,”​ said Birgisson.

He continued, “You save a lot on labor and material and such. The kits on the market today are not very robust, a lot of the proteins are not created, not expressed, so you end up with an empty result. We think ALiCE is going to change things. You get a much higher percentage of protein when you’re screening the DNA pieces.”​

The signing of the licensing agreement by Flaunhofer Institute will be the final piece of the puzzle and LenioBio can start supplying the market with what they believe to be a disruptive technology in protein expression.

“Now your [protein scientists] are going to capture all these ‘lost children’, all these proteins that were previously not expressed and therefore overlooked,”​ concluded Brigisson.