Aldevron and Evanoa Sign Licensing Agreement

Evanoa Bioscience, a cell line developer for biologics manufacturing, together with Aldevron, a global leader in the custom development and manufacture of plasmid DNA, RNA and proteins for the biotech industry, today announced the signing of a licensing agreement for two E. coli strains to be used in plasmid production.

Evanoa is using its proprietary evolution-based platform to develop novel strains of E. coli that produce more plasmid per cell and are more stable under fermentation conditions. Strains developed by Evanoa have been shown to produce as much as two times more plasmid per cell and total plasmid titer per fermentation. Based on these current favorable data, Aldevron has licensed the strains to further explore their utility in different environments.

“Evanoa’s platform is promising, and we are excited to explore the advantages of this technology for improved plasmid manufacturing,” said Venkata Indurthi, Chief Science Officer at Aldevron. “Aldevron is dedicated to innovation and looks forward to a successful partnership.”

These breakthroughs, particularly in plasmid yield per cell, promise to increase capacity, allowing more plasmid to be produced per fermenter run. While these results demonstrate significant production improvement for several plasmids via the Aldevron® AAV platform, Evanoa technology can be applied for the improvement of any type of plasmid.

“Plasmid production is an integral component of cost for exciting new therapies including vaccines, gene therapy products and other biologicals. Technology that significantly reduces the cost of plasmid production promises to increase availability of these life-saving drugs to more patients and improve the business sustainability of increasing research investment into expensive and important new treatments,” said Eudes de Crecy, CEO of Evanoa.

“Improving plasmid production in E. coli is a tough nut to crack from a genetic engineering standpoint, and there have been relatively few advances in the genetic understanding of plasmid copy number,” said Tom Lyons, CSO of Evanoa. “The relative speed of development and magnitude of improvement Evanoa achieved with its evolution technology was quite remarkable. However yields can be improved even further, so we are looking forward to expanding this partnership and support constant innovation at Aldevron® in service of their clients.”