PlantForm Corporation is a Canadian biotech company with a low-cost, proprietary manufacturing platform for a wide range of plant-made pharmaceuticals, including monoclonal antibodies, therapeutic proteins and vaccines for the treatment of cancer, HIV/AIDS, Ebola virus and other life-threatening illnesses. PlantForm’s pipeline features both innovator and biosimilar products, including:
• biosimilar trastuzumab, a plant-produced version of the breast cancer drug Herceptin®
• innovator antibodies for HIV/AIDS, funded by the Government of Canada and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
• innovator antibodies for treatment of Ebola virus (Sudan strain), with financial support from the National Research Council of Canada Industrial Research Assistance Program (NRC-IRAP) and in collaboration with the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID)
• recombinant butyrylcholinesterase (BuChE), an enzyme used as preventative medicine for people vulnerable to attack by nerve agents, organophosphates or other stimulants. PlantForm's plant-based vivoXPRESS™ technology provides several advantages over mammalian-cell and other fermentation systems used to produce most biologics on the market today: it’s fast, efficient, highly versatile (for new product development) and readily scalable. Best of all, it’s capable of reducing manufacturing costs for life-saving biologic drugs by up to 90 per cent. PlantForm licenses its technology from the University of Guelph, where it was developed by Dr. J. Christopher Hall, the former Canada Research Chair in Recombinant Antibody Technology. All relevant intellectual property is protected by patent filings.
