On March 30, 2022 KYORIN Holdings, Inc. reported that its wholly owned subsidiary of KYORIN pharmaceutical Co., Ltd. (Head office: Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo, President & CEO: Shigeru Ogihara, "KYORIN Pharmaceutical") has entered into a collaboration research agreement with Lumen Bioscience, Inc. (Head office: Seattle, WA, CEO: Brian Finrow, "Lumen") to obtain a development candidate toward clinical study (Press release, Kyorin, MAR 30, 2022, View Source [SID1234611166]).
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Under the terms of the agreement, KYORIN Pharmaceutical and Lumen will promote the collaboration research to obtain a clinical candidate for targets in the disease areas of interest to Kyorin Pharmaceutical by utilizing Lumen’s spirulina genetic protein engineering technology.
Biologic drugs (including antibodies) have conventionally been produced from E. coli, yeast, or mammalian cells. Lumen is the first company to establish a scalable method for manufacturing biologic drugs by genetically engineering spirulina instead of using these conventional methods. Spirulina, which is a well-known and healthy food product, can solubly express therapeutic proteins like these at extraordinarily high levels within its cytoplasm. And because both spirulina itself is safe to eat, the entire biomass—including the therapeutic proteins within—can be consumed orally without the costly and inefficient downstream purification steps required with conventional approaches. This technology is expected to provide safe orally deliverable biologic drugs at much lower costs than current approaches.
KYORIN Pharmaceutical believes that this opportunity to collaborate with Lumen’s breakthrough technology will enhance our research capabilities