iBio seems to be a sleeping giant waiting to awake from it’s slumber. Today we dig deep into some of it’s past price moves during pandemics like Coronavirus.
During the 2014 Ebola crisis iBio announced that they were working on a vaccine in collaboration with Caliber Biotherapeutics. In October of 2017, the stock skyrocketed from $4 to $31 that’s almost 620% percent gains you could have received.
Another crisis is the H1N1 pandemic which is also an influenza flu type virus, The vaccine demonstrated strong induction of dose correlated immune responses, with or without adjuvant, as assessed by virus microneutralization antibody assays and hemagglutination inhibition (HAI) responses. The vaccine was safe and well tolerated at all doses when administered with and without adjuvant.
These expected positive results are an important confirmation of the utility of the iBioLaunch platform, not only for rapid response to infectious disease challenges such as influenza, but also as a preferred approach to a broad range of vaccine and therapeutic products,
Robert Kay, iBio’s Chairman & Chief Executive Officer.
Sleeping Giant: Why iBio Uses Plant Based Therapeutics
One of the reasons why iBio uses a plant based protein model is because it has efficacy advantages over similar antibodies. iBio scientists engineer vectors for the desired protein sequence and transfer them to agrobacteria, which infiltrate mature plants and transfer the gene to the plant cell nuclei, which over the course of about five days churn out the therapeutic protein.
Downstream steps are similar to purification of proteins expressed in mammalian cells.
iBio employs transient transfection, meaning that the agrobacterium hijacks the plant’s protein without conferring permanent changes to the plant’s genetics—the plant cannot pass protein production capability on to offspring.
Thus, issues related to human consumption of genetically modified plants disappears, as does the potential for Frankenplant-type scenarios in which traits are transmitted willy-nilly to plants outside the production area. “FDA views the plants as a raw material,” says iBio CEO Robert Erwin.
iBio conducts its cGMP processes indoors for biopharmaceuticals, but applications are opening up for producing food or industrial proteins outdoors.
Like all genetic engineering, transient transfection requires getting genes into cells in some manner. Spraying the transfected agrobacterium onto plants works, but iBio has devised a much more efficient, and elegant technique. It submerges plants into a suspension of the bacterium, and applies a vacuum to remove gases lurking within the plant structure. Releasing the vacuum creates a positive relative pressure that forces agrobacterium into cells via interstitial openings.
