Pages of Newsweek Featuring Ventria Bioscience

On the heels of Tensegrity Prosthetics prominent feature in Popular Science (HERE) comes a recent Newsweek article (HERE) presenting a high level description of the green gene revolution or the marriage of biotechnology and agriculture. When referring to the art of leveraging agricultural products as therapeutics manufacturing plants (no pun intended…well maybe) Ventria Bioscience (Ft. Collins) was emphasized for some of their recent work.

Ventria has developed their proprietary ExpressTec technology platform – a protein/peptide production system – designed to create innovative human health products that incorporates self-pollinating crops (such as rice and barley) as the production host for these products, thereby bypassing many of the technological hurdles inherent in other protein production methods. Certain benefits of ExpressTec production process include: i) Economically advantaged expression capability (e.g. 10g/kg of brown rice) ii) Scalability for large volumes of recombinant proteins/peptides with minimal capital investment compared with other systems iii) Free of infectious or toxic contaminants iv) Self-pollinating crops provide a safe and closed production system and v) Efficient supply management - the protein/peptide can be stored in its lowest cost form for multiple years.

Ventria's ExpressTec platform has produced several proteins that have a variety of applications in human and animal health. Two specific products include recombinant human Lactoferrin and Lysozyme which are both found in human breast milk as well as most epithelial surface secretions including tears, nasogastric, saliva, and bronchial. Potential applications are in GI health for the management of acute diarrhea and certain bacterial, viral and fungal infections.

*NOTE* Feel the power of the Colorado BioScience Association (HERE)!
*NOTE* Take a look at the new Boulder Biotech Company Tree (HERE)!
*NOTE* Read the new eBook CLSDF 2007 - What's In A Year? (HERE)!

If you enjoyed this post get free email or RSS updates (here).