Avecia Launches pAVEway™ - Protein Expression for the Manufacture of Biopharmaceuticals

Avecia Biologics has announced the launch of its new biotherapeutic protein production technology – pAVEway™.

Avecia will officially unveil the addition of pAVEway to its growing portfolio of advanced technology solutions for the manufacture of therapeutic proteins at the BIO 2007 convention in Boston, Massachusetts (7-9 May).

According to Company, the technology can enable microbial production of a wide range of therapeutically useful proteins. pAVEway will also help to reduce the time to market and cost, while increasing flexibility and maintaining Avecia's high quality standards.

Achieving high levels of active protein during fermentation is often a bottleneck in the development of production process. The choice of expression system, host strain and fermentation conditions has a profound effect on the overall quantity and quality of protein produced.

Consequently, it has a major impact on the success of scale-up from R&D to large scale cGMP manufacturing, and ultimately on the cost of goods (CoG). Selection of the most appropriate and regulatory compliant production system for biopharmaceutical target proteins can be an empirical and time consuming approach.

Avecia's scientists have used their expertise and understanding of the expression kinetics of existing microbial systems to design and build a range of expression vectors, to select a range of suitable host cells and to optimise the fermentation processes.

These systems are combined in the pAVEway platform, which offers a way for fast track process creation and development. Among the features of pAVEway are the fully repressible basic expression and the modulatable expression induction. This enables the expression of a wider range of proteins.

Dr. Mark Carver, Chief Scientific Officer at Avecia Biologics, said: "pAVEway offers a highly versatile platform, including a solution for E.coli - the most widely used microbial expression host - and Pseudomonas. pAVEway provides Avecia's customers with maximum flexibility when making the critical decision on the choice of expression system and offers significant benefits in reducing process development times and costs whilst achieving high titre and quality."