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Current Press Release |
August 28, 2006
Chlorogen and Kentucky BioProcessing join
forces to bring new tobacco-made ovarian cancer drug to market
ST. LOUIS – Chlorogen, Inc. today announced
an agreement with Kentucky BioProcessing, LLC to collaborate on
a process to scale up development of an ovarian cancer drug produced
in the cells of tobacco plants.
Chlorogen, through its patented technology,
has produced a cancer-fighting protein in tobacco cells. Kentucky
BioProcessing (KBP) will use its expertise to develop a process
to extract the protein from the tobacco and purify it for therapeutic
use.
According to David N. Duncan, President and
CEO of Chlorogen, the product has the potential to be a significant
tool in the fight against ovarian cancer. “The collaboration
between Chlorogen and KBP means we could bring this potentially
life saving therapy to market even sooner than we originally hoped.
We are pleased to be working with a group with the depth of experience
and capabilities that KBP possesses.”
Chlorogen uses tobacco plants as small factories
to produce therapeutic proteins. Through a unique patented process,
the company produces proteins in the chloroplasts of plant cells
rather than in the cell nucleus. Because each cell has more than
100 chloroplasts, it is possible to produce mass quantities of
the protein in each plant, far more than can be produced by transforming
the single nucleus. Chlorogen’s lead protein has undergone
significant research, but until Chlorogen’s technology was
employed, it could not be produced in the quantities needed for
human testing.
While Chlorogen has successfully used chloroplast
transformation technology to produce mass copies of the protein,
it continues to work on refining a method for extracting the protein
from tobacco leaves. In the first phase of this collaborative agreement,
KBP will produce small quantities of the therapeutic protein for
additional tests. In later phases KBP plans to provide process
development assistance toward commercial scale of product production.
Hugh Haydon, Chairman of KBP, says that KBP’s
facilities are particularly well suited for the production of Chlorogen’s
product from tobacco. “This is an exciting project and we
appreciate the confidence that this agreement demonstrates in our
team and experience. This agreement fits perfectly with our long
term objective of establishing KBP and the Owensboro area as key
participants in the emerging industry of growing, extracting and
processing proteins from plant material.”
KBP is a contract research and manufacturing
company that recently purchased the Kentucky based assets of Large
Scale Biology Corporation. KBP is not engaged in the product discovery
side of the plant made protein sector but instead is focused on
using its facilities and experience to work with and add value
to products developed by others.
Chlorogen is a biopharmaceutical company
committed to using its technology, which was developed and patented
by the company’s technical founder, Dr. Henry Daniell at
the University of Central Florida, to become a world-class provider
of beneficial proteins for human therapy.
Contact information:
Dr. David Duncan
President and CEO
Chlorogen, Inc.
314 812 8151
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