Under the terms of the agreement Cobra will develop and manufacture bulk quantities of Israel-based biotech KAHR's Trans Signal Converter Protein therapeutics for preclinical and future clinical testing.
At BIO 2009 Philip Ridley-Smith, business development and group marketing manager, and Rocky Cranenburgh, head of molecular biology, explained to Outsourcing-Pharma the details of the deal and the benefits of using the maxXpress service.
Cobra has been working with KAHR on R&D for the past 12 months and the companies are now moving on to process development and scale up of the Israeli biotech’s TSCP proteins.
This process will use Cobra’s maxXpress service, which Ridley-Smith explained can generate a ten fold increase in product yield and is particularly useful for clients that are obtaining little therapeutic expression.
Ridley-Smith said that the system can produce 2g of antibodies per litre when not optimised but with a little tweaking this can be increased to 4g.
In addition maxXpress is capable of producing material in 10 weeks, which allows clients to see the technology’s potential without making a big investment.
Another advantage highlighted by Ridley-Smith is that the expression can be achieved even when a gene is inserted into a silent region. This increases the probability of having a high expressing clone and cuts down on the screening required, from 1000s to 10s.
The technology has been in development for the past 10 to 11 years, according to Ridley-Smith, and has been licensed to over 40 companies, with 12 projects started in the past 12 months.
Entering new markets
Cobra had previously focused on the DNA and virus markets but under new CEO Simon Saxby the company has shifted its attention to the antibody recombinant protein sector.
Ridley-Smith said that this market is competitive but that Cobra offers something different than other contract manufacturing organisations (CMO).
Despite the economic downturn Cobra is still seeing clients raise money, with one generating $40m (€28.8m), but they are opting to take contracts for specific steps in the production process instead of big, comprehensive deals.
However, Cobra is still looking to expand and ultimately would like to have the capacity to cover Phase I through to commercial scale operations, according to Ridley-Smith. Currently Cobra is primarily producing material for Phase I to II but it will look to expand if clients wanted larger scale manufacture.
In expanding its operations Ridley-Smith believes that Cobra would generate more consistent revenues, which would help increase visibility for the business.