FLC | FNLCR picks Dyadic to develop COVID-19 vaccine candidates

FNLCR picks Dyadic to develop COVID-19 vaccine candidates

June 17, 2020

Dyadic International, Inc., a global biotechnology company focused on further improving and applying its proprietary C1 gene expression platform to accelerate development, lower production costs and improve the performance of biologic vaccines, drugs, and other biologic products, at flexible commercial scales, today announced that it was selected by the Frederick National Laboratory to engineer its patented and proprietary C1 cell lines to produce a number of COVID-19 vaccine candidates which will be utilized by the Vaccine Research Center (VRC), which is part of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), at the National Institutes of Health.

Jupiter, Florida-based Dyadic is a global biotechnology company that is developing what it believes will be a potentially significant biopharmaceutical gene expression platform based on the fungus Thermothelomyces heterothallica (formerly Myceliophthora thermophila), named C1. The C1 microorganism, which enables the development and large scale manufacture of low-cost proteins, has the potential to be further developed into a safe and efficient expression system that may help speed up the development, lower production costs and improve the performance of biologic vaccines and drugs at flexible commercial scales.

"We are proud that our C1 technology has the potential to support the Vaccine Research Center COVID-19 vaccine development program by engineering innovative high yield C1 fungal cell lines to rapidly produce candidate vaccines with increased immunogenicity and attractive manufacturing properties." said Mark Emalfarb, Dyadic's Chief Executive Officer. "In addition, we are grateful to be able to also work together with the US, EU, Israel, and are in other discussions with governmental agencies, biotech/biopharma companies, and funding organizations to apply our industrially proven hyper-productive C1 gene expression platform by helping to address the immediate coronavirus outbreak and be better prepared for future infectious diseases, pandemic, and epidemic outbreaks. We hope to turn this unfortunate situation into an opportunity to advance biopharmaceutical manufacturing to help speed development, lower the cost and improve the performance of biologic vaccines and drugs such as insulin, seasonal flu and other vaccines and antibodies to make healthcare more accessible and affordable to patients globally."