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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