VTU Technology and Biomay, two leading Austrian biotech companies, announced today, that they have entered into a licensing agreement for the production of recombinant allergens.
VTU Technology, currently offering a very broad and comprehensive Pichia pastoris expression platform, grants Biomay access to VTU´s Pichia pastoris protein expression technology. Biomay, a global leader in allergy immunotherapy, will apply industrial Pichia expression strains generated by VTU for the commercial production of recombinant allergens. Under the terms of the agreement, VTU Technology will receive royalties based on Biomay´s worldwide sales of the recombinant allergens.
VTU´s Pichia platform - standing out due to its diversity of expression tools and ingenious expression strategies - enables the production of high-performance expression strains, high-quality proteins and economically, viable protein production processes. “VTU´s Pichia platform has already been utilized for the production of a wide range of different recombinant proteins with licenses granted to companies from diverse industries. We are very happy to extend this list of partnerships to the allergen space by our agreement with Biomay”, said Thomas Purkarthofer, Head of Business Development at VTU Technology.
“For Biomay, this technology cooperation with VTU is an excellent option for manufacturing of allergens being difficult to express,” adds Hans Huber, Chief Operating Officer at Biomay. “Thereby, we recently managed to produce and offer for sale the major allergen from ragweed pollen, Amb a 1, as a recombinant product.”
About VTU Technology
VTU Technology, a leading contract research and development company, offers the broadest toolbox and most versatile technology platform available for Pichia pastoris recombinant protein production. VTU develops high performance expression strains and economically viable protein production processes for the manufacture of biopharmaceuticals, enzymes and various other recombinant proteins.
Headquartered in Grambach/Graz, Austria, VTU Technology is a private company and a subsidiary of VTU Holding, an Austrian enterprise that combines several technology and engineering companies in chemistry, pharma & life science. The VTU group currently counts around 370 highly qualified employees with subsidiaries in different European countries. The VTU group was able to boost its turnover from 40 million Euro to more than 60 million Euro within last year.
About Biomay
Based in Vienna, Austria, Biomay was the first company worldwide to produce a broad spectrum of major recombinant allergens for research and diagnostic. Today, Biomay puts its strategic focus on specific immunotherapy of allergic diseases. Biomay’s lead product is BM32 – a recombinant-based therapeutic vaccine against grass pollen allergy, which is the most advanced candidate developed from Biomay´s proprietary peptide-carrier technology. BM32 has achieved promising results in a recently concluded Phase IIb placebo-controlled, multinational trial. Additionally, Biomay operates as a Contract Manufacturing Organisation (CMO), offering services for GMP-conform microbial-derived recombinant proteins and plasmid DNA.