Xcellerex Receives US Grant for Biopharmaceutical Production

Marlboro, MA (July 17)-Xcellerex, Inc. received two Phase-I contracts from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Arlington, VA) for the Accelerated Manufacture of Pharmaceuticals (AMP) program. The AMP program is a three-phase program in which the US military is focused on technologies for producing emergency therapeutics and vaccines. The total funding for the two Phase-I contracts is more than $13 million.

Phase I of the AMP program is focused on optimizing host strains that will express a model vaccine and antibody and demonstrate small-scale production. Subsequent phases will be aimed at rapid process optimization, scale-up and cost-effective
production.

Xcellerex will serve as the prime contractor on the first grant, in which the company is collaborating with Dowpharma (Midland, MI), a business unit of The Dow Chemical Company (Midland, MI), Biopharm Services (Marlboro, MA), and deltaDOT, Ltd. (London).

Xcellerex will contribute its “PDMax” process-development and “FlexFactory” manufacturing technololgies, Dowpharma its “Pfenex Expression Technology,” a Pseudomonas-based expression system, deltaDOT its “Peregrine” and “Osprey” high-throughput technology platforms for biomolecule analysis, and BioPharm Services advanced modeling capabilities for biopharmaceutical manufacturing.

On the second contract, Xcellerex is collaborating with Neugenesis Corp. (Burlingame, CA)  as the prime contractor, SRI International (Menlo Park, CA), and BioPharm Services. The grant is based on the use of Xcellerex “PDMax” and “FlexFactory” technologies to show the potential of Neugenesis’s “NeuBIOS” protein-production platform. Neugenesis and SRI will provide project management and integration systems for the team.