In 2001, I co-founded Selexis with prize money that I won from the de Vigier Foundation in Switzerland followed by the NETS prize (the predecessor program of Venture Kick), a philanthropic three-stage funding model initiated to support Swiss startups. Fast forward to 2018, Selexis is now among the top mammalian cell line development companies worldwide and we recently signed our 100th commercial license agreement (CLA) – a significant achievement resulting from our investments in science that ultimately allow for the production of life-saving therapeutics that previously could not be generated in mammalian cells.
Over the past 10 years, we have witnessed an explosion of novel biologic therapeutics from the biopharma industry, such as bi-specific, tri-specific or multi-specific antibodies, more sophisticated fusion proteins combining moieties such as cytokines or antibody fragments with antibodies, bi-specific T-cell engagers and mini-bodies, to name a few. As our chief scientific officer, Pierre-Alain Girod, discussed in a February 1, 2018 blog post on using CHO cells to address increasingly complex biotherapeutics production, we discovered that these more complicated proteins require novel approaches based on sets of new technologies that will address complex pathway demands (such as those required by the secretory or the glycosylation pathways). These new technologies are thus combined to the direct effect of boosting transcription levels using our own epigenetic elements. To strengthen our SUREtechnology Platform™, we therefore developed the SURE CHOMplus™ Libraries – offering multiple levels of technologies to the dozens of partners who have contributed to our reaching our 100th signed CLA.
And we won’t stop here! Now, as part of the JSR Life Sciences family of companies, we are able to speed-up the timeline line of biologics production from Gene to GMP in nine (9) months or less; thereby, reducing the time it takes to get new biologics to clinic. We are extremely gratified with the role we have played in bringing life-saving therapeutic medicines to the clinic and we are excited to get to work generating the next 100 clinical candidates.
If you are interested in learning more about our capabilities, please reach out to our business development team.