COREE
Company, a member of Hanmi Science Consortium, has signed a strategic
partnership agreement with Infini Fluidic of the U.S. to develop a new method
in the microfluidic process producing mRNA vaccine lipid nanoparticle
structures.
Hanmi
Science CEO Lim Jong-yoon (left) and Infini Fluidic CEO Sagar Yadavali hold
their cooperation agreement at the University of Pennsylvania on Monday.
Hanmi
Science CEO Lim Jong-yoon also serves as the president of COREE Company.
Infini
Fluidics, a spinoff company from the University of Pennsylvania (UPenn),
develops manufacturing equipment and process technology for next-generation
drug delivery systems based on microfluidics technology using semiconductor
chip processes. Penn Center for Innovation (PCI) supports Infini Fluidics’ LNP
drug delivery system production process research.
Hanmi
Science Consortium also plans to collaborate and exchange with the UPenn
Industry-University Cooperation Foundation in various ways, such as
vaccine-related technology development and technology commercialization.
Under
the accord, the two companies will cooperate to research a new microfluidic
processing method, which is the most difficult part of manufacturing mRNA
vaccines.
Infini
Fluidic is researching a technology that can process ultra-fast microfluidics,
helping to maximize the hourly throughput of the microfluidic process, a bottleneck
in the production process, by enabling processing more than 128 times the
existing production.
“Studies
expanding the field of application of mRNA platform technology as a preventive
or therapeutic agent for cancer, AIDS, autoimmune and genetic diseases, as well
as vaccines for responding to future pandemics, are going on,” CEO Lim said.
Therefore,
the collaboration with Infini Fluidic and UPenn researching new methods in the
microfluidic process field is meaningful because it can lead to global new drugs
based on independent technology rather than limited development by, for
instance, evading the patents of existing technologies, Lim added.
Hanmi
Science Consortium, which has a common goal of distributing vaccines worldwide,
comprises Hanmi Pharmaceutical, COREE Company, GeneOne Life Science, Inovio
Pharmaceuticals, BioApp Green Vaccine, Herings Digital Medical, Myongji Medical
Foundation, GS Neotek, Pohang University of Science and Technology, and Pohang
City.
The
consortium has been expanding its partnership globally. For example, the
consortium signed a global clinical trial plan for its mRNA vaccine with Oxford
University last month through a pandemic science alliance agreement.
In
the first half of next year, it will submit an investigational new drug (IND)
application to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for one of the three mRNA
candidates that the consortium has secured through additional toxicity tests
and process improvement studies.
Source: Korea Biomedical Review