Altor BioScience Corporation announced that it has received a Phase I Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant from the National Cancer Institute (NCI) to support development of its proprietary processes for making therapeutic antibodies in transgenic lettuce. The grant application was submitted in response to President Bush’s Executive Order encouraging innovation in manufacturing-related research and development. Altor’s long-term goal in this project is to use its plant expression system to produce a variety of immunotherapeutic drugs at very low manufacturing costs.

Valentin Negrouk, Ph.D., Senior Scientist and Principal Investigator of the project, commented, “I am very excited that Altor has been awarded this grant. The funding will help us to accelerate our efforts to manufacture biomedical products using an economical plant-based system. It is encouraging that NCI recognizes our innovations and the broad application of this technology to anti-cancer antibodies and other drugs.”

Dr. Negrouk and his team have published an article in the August issue of Plant Science describing efficient transient expression of fully functional therapeutic antibodies in lettuce. In the NCI-supported project, Altor will extend these studies and conduct preclinical efficacy testing in tumor models using antibodies already produced at high levels in stable transgenic lettuce. Lettuce has advantages in that it is self-pollinating and can be commercially produced in large quantity under well-defined conditions (i.e. hydroponic growth, green house contained, animal pathogen free). Altor intends to exploit these advantages in developing a safe, readily scalable process to manufacture well-characterized biological drugs at a fraction of the cost of the current commercial methods.

With this grant award, Altor has received ten SBIR grants for the development of its patented technologies and products. Altor acquired intellectual property rights to the transgenic plant expression technology from Sunol Molecular Corporation in 2005. Altor also has a collaborative agreement with Dow Chemical Company on therapeutic antibody production in transgenic plants.

Altor BioScience Corporation is a product-oriented biopharmaceutical company engaged in the research and development of novel therapeutic approaches for treating cancer, viral infections and autoimmune diseases. Altor's most advanced products include T-cell receptor-based protein therapeutics targeting a variety of different cancers.