Impact UPMC

Manufacturing Track

Entrepreneurship Award

Days after days, the recombinant proteins production is growing as a vital industrial science, in major fields of work such as healthcare or agronomy. Optimization of this production, in fact reducing the cost and time of production of these molecules is the main priorty of companies of this sector. Another major challenge remain to further automatize these process. When we started the project our main goal was to find a solution that could help to resolve the issues of the lack of access to proper healthcare in developing contries.To do so, we investigated the causes of the healthcare failures in different regions of the world that leads to a lower life span compared to developed countries. Beyond a lack of basal hygienic prevention in an environment often favourable to the growth of various pathogenic agents, the lack of access to healthcare appeared as an obvious source of this lower quality of health. Through our box, we focused more specifically on the lack of access to preventive and curative protein drugs. We want to innovate in the way we produce already existing therapeutic molecules.

We have then focused 3 main causes of the lack of access to drugs in the world : 1) The lack of financial means for the purchase and setting up of drug production 2) Geographical isolation of the countries concerned 3) Storage and transport of drugs issues

Strategic Business Unit (SBU)

In order to have a more general view of the drug market, we have set up a SBU table around the question of the lack of access to healthcare.

Large companies do not provide sufficient answers to the 3 main lack of access to care in the developing countries. This explains the specific lack of drugs in these countries even though there are existing treatments. In addition, this table allows us to highlight the customers expectations and place the contribution of our box according to them. Our major difference from large companies lies in the ability to get instantaneously a significant amount of therapeutic molecules to treat the medical emergency developing countries lives. Moreover, for a simplified heterologous synthesis we limited our box to the production of protein drugs for now, which is already a sufficient challenge. Although, criterias tend vary, depending on of the client expectations profile, there is a notable market around drugs needed in a quantity and in a short time lapse which correspond to one cycle production of our box. This specifity ou our project will be a key asset for our future business development. Moreover, the local production through our box bypasses the storage and transport of drugs issues that can often occur, and allow a controlled and reliable production of these drug which is a main issue, in sub-Saharan Africa for example. We can therefore place our box on the market of protein drugs with a punctual need that can wait for a 8-10 hours production and that are needed in micrograms to milligrams per dose. This drugs dosage would enable the treatment of multiple people with one cycle of production of our box. In this market, we can answer the 3 main causes of the lack of access to healthcare mentioned before. We are therefore innovating on the production process of already existing protein drugs. Thus, our strategic segment is the developing countries.

Drug candidates

We then researched therapeutic proteins which are nowadays needed, and matching with the specific reasons regarding the lack of access to healthcare we explain before and that our box can constitue a solution for. The pathology treated by these drug candidates has to: - Allow a minimum action time of about 8h to 10 hours - Be curable by a quantity of active substances from micrograms to milligrams We then selected the 3 types of diseases, we presented in the state of art of the current medical needs worldwide. Some examples of treatments The BioMaker Factory could make available : IM : Intramuscular IV : Intravenous

We have presented here the pathologies illustaring the most the mortality due to the lack of access to healthcare. However, we can imagine that our box can also respond to certain chronic conditions. Besides, we should not forget that our box is not frozen project. Around its role of automated production and purification, it leaves a large room for its optimization and allows us to work on a decreased production time and an increased quantity of production. The possible optimization of the box could also revolve in the creation of a more or less storage, an ephemeral method to compensate for the time variable of production. It should be noted that this box is also a solution to the ethical problems related to obtaining of some serum proteins from animal immunization or for the production of hormones, in fact animal use for the production of drugs in general. But also to the problem of immunogenicity of these serotherapies in humans.

Potential partners

As described in the human practices part we talked to MSF and the start up MedTrucks to know more about the qualitative and quantitative data from the field. Then, our discussions went forward to thinking on a possible partnership with each of them in the futur. More precisely, our discussion with MedTrucks first focused on the abilities of their trucks to insert our box. The size of some of their trucks allows our partnership. In fact, we all think that working in partnership could change the face of the actual access to healthcare through the assembly of our box and their travels in places and knowledge of the work in the ground. We are also currently working on a potential partnership with a woman working on the creation of a clinic in a isolated region of Cameroon.

Going forward with this new mode of production

We can easily imagine many other uses for our box. The necessary production of these proteins must therefore be consistent with the capacity of the box in terms of time and quantity of production. Thus, we can offer a specific production between manual work at the benchtop and companies large-scale bioproduction. This would be a major gain of time and money relative to the optimization of a specific strain research and to the production of the protein by a research laboratory engineer. In addition, this box is an invitation to the development of synthetic biology in the countries it will be used in. We can hope for an independent development of these countries through diverse and varied opportunities in this field. Ultimately, this would be the source of potential local partners and therefore enable the specific development of our own strain library according to the local needs and regulations for instance?