SBIR Phase I: Large Scale Production of Antiviral Interferons for the Treatment of COVID-19

SBIR 第一阶段：大规模生产用于治疗 COVID-19 的抗病毒干扰素

• 批准号: 2027985
• 负责人: Ryan Shepherd
• 金额: $ 25.6万
• 依托单位: PhylloTech Inc.
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2020
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2020-06-01 至 2021-08-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2027985&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: SBIR; Phase; Large; Scale; Production

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will be to advance the development of production for COVID-19 treatments. The COVID-19 pandemic is placing great strain on the supply chain for protein and antibody therapeutics and research products. Interferons represent a specific class of protein released in response to viral infections; they are currently being tested as important therapies to combat COVID-19 infections and to regulate the immune system. This project will develop a new system to produce and purify interferons using a new platform based on a plant system. No plant system has been utilized commercially to produce human interferons, due to product loss during purification from plant tissue. This system overcomes this challenge by secreting the proteins to leaf surfaces where they will easily be recovered. The rapid scalability of this plant-based system can allow fast production of COVID-19 therapeutics at high levels and lower cost than current protein expression systems. The proposed Phase I project will develop a photosynthetic platform for the production of COVID-19 therapeutics, as current production strategies are expensive to scale and limited in production capacity. Plants will be generated that produce and secrete interferons for the purposes of large-scale production. Further research efforts will be performed to determine if newly-identified trichome-specific promoters, intron-mediated expression elements, and unique protein secretion signals that are cleaved during protein maturation can optimize and enhance the system for interferon production. Plant-made interferons will be tested for activity and compared against interferons generated in other biomanufacturing systems.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

该小型企业创新研究（SBIR）第一阶段项目的更广泛影响/商业潜力将是推进COVID-19治疗药物的生产开发。 COVID-19大流行对蛋白质和抗体疗法及研究产品的供应链造成巨大压力。 干扰素是一种针对病毒感染而释放的特定蛋白质;目前正在测试它们作为对抗COVID-19感染和调节免疫系统的重要疗法。 本项目将开发一种新的系统，使用基于植物系统的新平台来生产和纯化干扰素。 由于从植物组织纯化过程中的产物损失，商业上还没有利用植物系统生产人干扰素。 该系统通过将蛋白质分泌到叶片表面来克服这一挑战，在那里它们很容易被回收。 这种基于植物的系统的快速可扩展性可以允许快速生产高水平的COVID-19治疗剂，并且比目前的蛋白质表达系统成本更低。 拟议的第一阶段项目将开发一个用于生产COVID-19治疗药物的光合平台，因为当前的生产策略规模化成本高昂且产能有限。 为了大规模生产的目的，将产生产生和分泌干扰素的植物。 将进行进一步的研究工作，以确定新鉴定的毛状体特异性启动子，内含子介导的表达元件，以及在蛋白质成熟过程中切割的独特蛋白质分泌信号是否可以优化和增强干扰素生产系统。 植物制造的干扰素将被测试活性并与其他生物制造系统中产生的干扰素进行比较。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。