deltaDOT selected to aid 'the accelerated manufacture of pharmaceuticals'

The members of the consortium were selected by the US Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in a bid to radically reduce the time needed to manufacture life-saving vaccines and monoclonal antibodies enhancing the US' ability to respond to a wide variety of biological threats.

"The accelerated manufacture of pharmaceuticals program will twin rapid protein expression platforms with radically-enhanced technologies that enable extraordinarily fast production of peptide drugs at massive quantities and at pennies per dose," said Dr Michael Callahan, program manager for DARPA.

The consortium will receive $7.9m (€5.7m) and is being led by US-based biologics manufacturer Xcellerex and includes technical consultancy firm Biopharm Services, Dowpharma and deltaDOT.

Xcellerex will provide the equipment needed for the biologics manufacturing, while Dowpharma will provide the expertise to develop the Pf enex host organism in which the drugs will be produced.

The program will use the expertise developed by deltaDOT in its development of the Peregrine and Osprey instruments to provide the critical analytical capabilities needed to track product quality throughout the drug development program.

"deltaDOT's Label Free Intrinsic Imaging (LFII) will form the cornerstone of the analytical steps in this project, from R&D through to the QA/QC

[quality assurance / quality control] stages.

Our rapid and cost effective LFI technology is the perfect fit in the programme and complements the excellent technology of our partners," said Dr Stuart Hassard, deltaDOT's head biologist.

The instruments have been designed to use carousels and deltaDOT will be adapting the instruments to take samples from 96 well plates to allow the team to study the development process faster than ever before.

The current systems will initially be used at-site, with the consortium taking samples and preparing them using a standard three-phase extraction kit and then running the samples on the Peregrine.

Dr Hassard believes that simply using the Peregrine at-site could increase the efficiency of the development process no end.

"It can take a week for people to find out what is going on within their bioreactor and if they producing the right protein, that's a ludicrous waste of time and money.

The whole point of this project is to speed up the process of making vaccines and our technology can let them get results in 40 minutes," said Dr Hassard.

The use of the Peregrine in an in-line capacity is also under consideration, but that would involve the development of an automated sample work-up system.

In addition to the development money, another benefit of being involved with the project is that deltaDOT has already received three Peregrine orders from other team members and are selling instruments "as fast as they make them".

deltaDOT recently won a grant from the South East England Development Agency (SEEDA) to commercialise the Osprey biomolecule stability analyser and is currently two months into a year long development process - right on time for use in the DARPA project and analysis of final products during the QA/QC process.