Ukraine Opens Up to International Biopharm Enterprise

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Researched by Industrialinfo.com (Industrial Information Resources, Incorporated; Houston, Texas). In December, 2002 the government of the Ukraine moved to reduce the overall cost and development time of commercial drug manufacturing by aligning the nation's future health-planning with new plant-based biopharmaceutical technologies. An official letter of intent was signed between two foreign companies, Large Scale Biology Corporation (LSBC) (NASDAQ:LSBC) (Vacaville, California) and Icon Genetics AG (Munich, Germany) in order to accomplish this.

This decision comes as a result of the Ukrainian government's concern about the high cost of therapeutic medicine and about the country's dependence on imports in this sector. After analyzing all aspects of the problem, the decision to address these issues by relying on the most advanced technologies for the production of biopharmaceuticals led to their cooperation with LSBC and Icon. This move is seen as being extremely progressive by the global pharmaceutical industry.

LSBC and Icon will work with Ukrainian scientists to produce specific biologics (therapeutic proteins or vaccines) in living plants with the use of their respective proprietary technologies. This will enable domestic development of plant-derived biopharmaceuticals for eventual sale in the Commonwealth of Independent States. In the future, participation may be extended to include one or more Ukrainian pharmaceutical companies.

Icon's transgenic plant technology will be used by Ukrainian scientists to develop the plants that will produce the pharmaceutical proteins, while LSBC's downstream processing technology and biomanufacturing expertise will be used for commercial-scale pharmaceutical grade production. This combination will further strengthen the already intense relationship between the two companies.

For LSBC, a world leader in plant-based production of pharmaceutical proteins, this agreement follows an announcement made in July 2002 of a plant-based vaccine development collaboration with South Africa's University of Cape Town to address AIDS and cervical cancer. LSBC says these agreements demonstrate the breadth of international opportunities in biotechnology today and their company's strength in addressing global biopharmaceutical demands.

As agricultural biotechnology enters the post-genomic era, Icon is developing enabling tools and platform technologies for the rapid introduction of genes into commercial varieties and the use of genomic applications. The company is looking to replace current, imperfect first-generation products by providing integrated suites of technologies (transgene operating systems) that will bring the speed and efficiency of crop engineering up to that of gene discovery. Icon has research divisions in Germany and Princeton, New Jersey.