RTP to Get Vaccine-Making Facility

Source from:  Raleigh (NC) News & Observer 08/13/2010

A Canadian developer of flu inoculations and other vaccines plans to use a $21 million U.S. Defense Department grant to build an 87,000-square-foot production facility in Research Triangle Park. Medicago, based in Quebec, plans to create 85 jobs paying $50,229 on average, not including benefits, over three years. The Medicago jobs would pay less than the Durham County average wage of $57,772. Still, if it creates the jobs, the company will receive a $128,000 state grant as a financial incentive and a matching grant administered by Durham County. Medicago specializes in producing vaccines by growing viruslike cultures on tobacco leaves, a process that reduces the time needed to create vaccines from six months to several weeks. In awarding its grant, the Defense Department cited the technology's potential to manufacture high quantities of vaccine to rapidly respond to epidemics, bioterrorist attacks and other public health emergencies. "This is really breakthrough science they're working on," said Sam Taylor, president of N.C. Biosciences Organization, an industry trade group. Medicago CEO Andy Sheldon said that when the new facility is completed in 14 months, it will have the capacity to create 10 million doses of vaccine per month. The facility will include a greenhouse to cultivate 14,000 tobacco plants, labs to extract vaccines from the plants and administrative offices. The 11-year-old development company, which employs 90 people in Canada, is several years away from selling its products on the market. Sheldon said the company is working on three vaccines, but its technology could one day be used to create at least 40 kinds of proteins, viruses and enzymes for a wide variety of applications. Sheldon said Medicago picked North Carolina over two other states in large part because of the high-tech work force available in Research Triangle Park. The state's code name for its campaign to recruit Medicago was Project Flower. "The Research Triangle Park's reputation is known to people who don't even know where it is," Sheldon said. Medicago's facility will cost about $25 million to build, he said. In addition, the company will invest $7.5 million in the plant, and Alexandria Real Estate Equities will invest $13.5 million. Alexandria is the nation's largest landlord to the life sciences industry. The U.S. government has been pushing for the development of an antidote to the swine flu in the wake of last year's H1N1 pandemic. The outbreak turned out to be milder than some had feared, but the flu scare demonstrated that existing methods of vaccine production were too slow to respond in time to avert a major public health crisis. Medicago will grow tobacco plants from seed and submerge 5-week-old plants in a chemical bath containing proteins that will be used to make vaccines. The proteins will grow on the tobacco leaves and will be extracted after five days. After the proteins are removed, the plants will be destroyed. He said tobacco leaves act as sponges in absorbing the solution which penetrates the plant cellulose and "switches on the cell machinery." Sheldon noted that the plant used in vaccine production is not the same species of tobacco used to make cigarettes. He said that other companies have worked with this technology but either ran out of cash or ran out of time before they could commercialize their product. Medicago hopes to have approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration by 2013 to make its tobacco-based vaccines, and hopes to be selling the product the following year. Enditem