City of Hope Takes a Commercial Product License to Use ProBioGen’s AGE1.CR® Vaccine Manufacturing Platform

City of Hope Takes a Commercial Product License to Use ProBioGen’s AGE1.CR® Vaccine Manufacturing Platform

BERLIN, Germany and DUARTE, USA, June 09, 2021 / B3C newswire / -- ProBioGen AG has announced a commercial product license agreement with City of Hope, a world-renowned independent research and treatment center for cancer, diabetes and other life-threatening diseases, granting City of Hope® the rights to use ProBioGen's cell line  AGE1.CR.pIX® for manufacturing City of Hope's COVID-19 vaccine candidate.

ProBioGen's innovative vaccine development platform is expected to be ideally suited for the production of large quantities of City of Hope's synthetic MVA-based COVID-19 vaccine. It will enable City of Hope and/or its commercial partners to manufacture the vaccine at scale for late stage clinical development and eventually, the market to address the urgent needs of the ongoing pandemic. The vaccine is currently being tested in a phase 1 clinical trial, and was manufactured on City of Hope's main campus within its Center for Biomedicine & Genetics, one of its three manufacturing facilities that meet strict GMP (good manufacturing practice) guidelines.

ProBioGen's duck suspension cell line AGE1.CR.pIX was designed to serve the industrial, GMP-compliant production of a wide variety of viruses in large bioreactors and is free of any adventitious agents. It has already proven its great utility for viral vector-based vaccine productions in various clinical trials.

Don Diamond, Ph.D., the vaccine's principal investigator and co-inventor of the patents covering City of Hope's proprietary synthetic MVA vaccine platform, said: "ProBioGen's cell line is expected to enable a key step of City of Hope's COVID-19 manufacturing strategy to move from primary cells to a continuous suspension cell line and thus enable the rapid and flexible manufacture of our uniquely engineered viral vector vaccine."

Dr. Volker Sandig, Chief Scientific Officer at ProBioGen stated: "Easily scalable plug and play technology for cost effective vaccine production is of highest importance particularly for Emergency Vaccines. Finding high performance from the first experiments on, we are pleased to complement City of Hope's ambitious COVID-19 vaccine strategy with our manufacturing approach."