Entries by Thomas Gabrielczyk

Making a better cheese

The French company Standing Ovation uses precision fermentation to create the protein that gives cheese its unique properties. With his pitch, co-founder and CEO Frédéric P’ques took the prize at the start-up pitch of the Industria Biotech.

AGC Biologics doubles mammalian capacity

With a new expansion coming online in Copenhagen, AGC Biologics is offering more capacity in Europe for mammalian biologics projects using innovative single-use bioreactor technology. This is the latest in a string of new investments from the global CDMO to expand capacity and upgrade technology at its sites in Europe, Japan and the United States.

Unleashing the power of LNP encapsulation

The Covid-19 pandemic has changed perception of the value of ­rapid ­vaccine production, followed by multi-billion investments across the globe. While nanomedicines are receiving attention for enhancing stability and targeted activity of APIs, their broad availability ­currently suffers from the same production bottleneck as mRNA vaccines. Leon-nanodrugs, a pharma technology company, is developing a disruptive approach to unlock high-speed vaccine production.

LISAvienna’s 20th anniversary celebration was a blast

Vienna is one of Europe’s most dynamic innovation hubs in the life sciences. End of ­September, the life science community met to celebrate LISAvienna. For 20 years, LISAvienna has been acting as the cluster’s central point of contact. In close collaboration with Austria’s support and funding ecosystem, the platform accompanies and supports bioentrepreneurs through the ups and downs of their journey to transfer innovative business ideas into viable products and services.

Cells: The heart of Biovian’s rAAV manufacturing

Viral Vectors?Commercial-scale manufacturing demands a high yield of potent rAAV products. Understanding the metabolism during cell growth, especially at high densities, molecular effects of transfection or infection in production is vital. In addition, the choice of producer cell type determines the PTMs of the AAV capsid and potency. Successful trials in tweaking cell factories’ genes to boost rAAV particle yields set the direction for further development.

BioNTech and Ryvu Therapeutics enter into global collaboration

Renewed focus on cancer: COVID-19 vaccine company BioNTech SE (Nasdaq: BNTX) and Ryvu Therapeutics S.A., located in Krakow (Warsaw Stock Exchange: RVU), a Polish clinical-stage cancer therapeutics development company, announced that the companies have entered into a research collaboration for several multi-target immunotherapy programmes, as well as an exclusive licensing agreement for Ryvu’s STING agonist portfolio as stand-alone small molecules.

Amsterdam Neogene Therapeutics aquired by AstraZeneca

AstraZeneca announced an agreement to acquire Neogene Therapeutics Inc. (Neogene), a global clinical-stage biotechnology company spezialised in next-generation T-cell receptor therapies (TCR-Ts) that offer a novel cell therapy approach for targeting cancer. The acquisition delivers an initial payment of $200m on deal closing, and a further up to $120m in both contingent milestones-based and non-contingent consideration.