LenioBio GmbH announced that the company has been awarded a grant of €2.37 million to accelerate the scale-up of its proprietary protein expression platform ALiCE®.

Today's drug development process is cumbersome and expensive. On average, the time from discovery of a new protein drug to market introduction spans 12–14 years and exceeds €2B. In all four phases of drug development - drug discovery, pre-clinical studies, clinical trials and commercial production – there are inefficiencies that together constitute the problem. The ALiCE® platform will address these inefficiencies and thereby cutting the drug-to-market timelines by several years. The impact of our platform technology has been recognized by the Horizon 2020 EU funding body, which awarded LenioBio the funds to accelerate the development and implementation of these much-needed solutions.

Remberto Martis, Ph.D., CEO of LenioBio, explained: "Our solution is the first eukaryotic cell-free platform, scalable according to customer's need. Simplified, ALiCE® is the concentrated protein machinery of the cell. Currently, we concentrate the protein machinery of the cell in mL ALiCE solution and offer it as Expression kits to our customer. The Horizon funding will speed up the platform development to 100L scale to service the need of the market. Thus, our solutions for the drug development process are fast, scalable and very cost-effective."

Ricarda Finnern, Ph.D., Chief Scientific Officer at LenioBio concluded: "With our ALiCE® platform, we have expressed proteins not expressible in an economical way in other platforms, as well as other proteins that were so far not expressible at all. This allows for viable protein drug candidates to be discovered faster, as well as enabling attractive candidates to be moved into clinical trials faster. With the Horizon funding, our R&D team can now accelerate the scaling and yield increase of the ALiCE® platform to deliver large scale quantities of proteins for therapeutic use. Furthermore, the linear scaling of the cell-free ALiCE® platform to production quantities takes only months, instead of years in the cases of the cell-based platform. The overall effect of these advantages of ALiCE® will be a reduction in the long timelines of protein drug development."