Skip to content
Home
Benefits

Growing Tomorrow’s Biologics with FastPharming®

For decades, traditional mammalian cell culture (e.g. CHO cells) has been critical to the development of biologics.

However, this platform is susceptible to microbial contamination, requires expensive cell line development, and is burdened with scale-up time and challenges. New pathways are required to realize the outstanding array of opportunities for advancing human health.

The FastPharming System is a plant-based protein expression platform and is designed to pick up where CHO left off, pioneering the next generation of biologics. Here’s how.

Click the leaves to learn more

Speed

Sustainability

Safety

Scalability

Economy

Versatility

Quality

back to FastPharming

Safety

Since mammalian viruses and prions can't replicate in plants, FastPharming minimizes virus and prion risks.

Bunyavirus, Parvovirus, and Prions are crossed out since their risk of transmission are reduced in plants

Bunyavirus

Parvovirus

Prions

back to FastPharming

Speed

Development in FastPharming does not require clone selection, master cell bank establishment, and media development that are needed with traditional bioprocessing:

  • Rapidly evaluate candidates by getting to transfection stage faster
  • Move from evaluation to GMP production seamlessly
  • Scale up your manufacturing with minimal further R&D work
  • Use plants as bioreactors to reduce the time for development and validation
Mammalian cell culture by stir-tank bioreactor
~12+Months
Mammalian Cell Culture
plants
3Months
FastPharming
Time to drug substance may vary and does not include product-specific process and assay development work. Mammalian cell culture timelines given above are for illustrative purposes only based upon competitive data from publicly available sources. Actual timelines may vary.
back to FastPharming

Scalability

Using the FastPharming System, developers can avoid the complexities of cell culture scale-up that can cause delays and product quality issues at any point in the process.

Step changes in bioreactor volume size can impact critical product quality attributes. Common factors challenging the process and product consistency throughout a product's lifecycle include:

  • Power-to-volume ratios
  • Aspect ratio
  • Feed Strategy / Foam Management
  • Heat and mass transfer properties
  • Sparger design

These changes can affect product glycosylation, deamidation, and oxidation and contribute to formation of aggregates or fragments.

FastPharming System Scalability

To scale-up production in the cGMP FastPharming System, simply grow more bioreactors (plants) and avoid step-change issues.

Cell culture requires larger, reoptimized bioreactors to scale-up heterogeneous protein production. FastPharming only requires more plants with more homogeneous proteins.
back to FastPharming

Sustainability

Protein expression with FastPharming may reduce the problems of traditional manufacturing that requires energy-intensive consumables, bioreactor operations, and plastic disposables; our key upstream raw materials are just seeds, purified water, plant nutrients, and some photons!

Plant production is a greener alternative depicted by a crossed out electric control box next to a plant in the palm of a hand.
back to FastPharming

Economy

FastPharming Avoids the Costs of Cell Line Development

Eliminate the cost of cell line development, media development, and clone selection.

Reduces Cost of Entry

Lower required initial capital investment reduces entry barriers, allowing the exploration of more potentially life-saving discoveries.

Maximizes Revenue Opportunity

Concept to GMP production timeline shortened by ~75% adds a year or more to a drug's patent life.*

*Time to drug substance may vary and does not include product-specific process and assay development work. Mammalian cell culture timelines are based upon competitive data from publicly available sources. Actual timelines may vary.
back to FastPharming

Versatility

Microbial expression systems are limited in their production of glycoproteins, and mammalian cell culture is not well suited for several other recombinant proteins, such as cytokines and growth factors. Alternatively, FastPharming is a versatile platform capable of producing complex monoclonal antibodies, lectins, peptides, growth factors & cytokines, virus-like particles, and more.

orange virus-like particle blue virus-like particle cytokine ribbon structure antibodies
back to FastPharming

Quality

FastPharming uses vertical farming LED-light controls and advanced hydroponics to deliver consistently high-quality proteins. Glycaneering Technology™ enables homogeneous N-linked glycosylation, as well as afucosylation capability for increased potency of anti-cancer monoclonal antibodies.

Mass Spectrometry trace. The single peak shows G0 glycans (i.e., afucosylated and lack xylose) are the only glycans present in the FastPharming sample.
Sustainability
Safety
Scalability
Speed
Quality
Versatility
Economy
Top