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G+FLAS Life Sciences Succeeded in Expressing COVID-19 Recombinant Vaccine Candidate Through Plant-Based Platform

  • Thursday, March 5, 2020, 4:53 pm
  • ACROFAN=Seunghee Shin
  • seunghee.shin@acrofan.com
 On March 5th, a biotech startup company in Korea, G+FLAS Life Sciences Co., Ltd. (CEO Sunghwa Choe) announced that it has begun to develop a new vaccine for coronavirus disease (COVID-19).

G+FLAS Life Sciences has confirmed that the recombinant vaccine candidate for COVID-19 is expressed in plants. Based on this, the company will start a full-scale animal testing.

 

Soon after the genetic information of COVID-19 was released in January, G+FLAS Life Sciences selected promising spike protein segments as vaccine candidates and artificially synthesized the genes for plant cell expression. Later, it created a recombinant DNA that is inserted into the plant expression vector, and it was then delivered to plants and successfully synthesized proteins.

Proteins that have been expressed are currently undergoing medium-sized purification, and G+FLAS Life Sciences plans to start developing vaccines as early as next week, starting with animal testing. If the results of animal testing are successful, the company will mass produce vaccine candidates through its plant hotel system. The system is expected to produce about 20,000 doses of protein per production.

The plant-based platform of G+FLAS Life Sciences has the advantage of being able to produce vaccine candidates faster than the eggs or animal cell culture technology used in existing vaccine development. In particular, it is the core of the company's technology to improve plants first with genetic scissors technology to eliminate the toxicity that can occur when the proteins produced in plants are administered to the human body. The company is confident that the production of vaccine candidates using plants with protein glycopattern engineering has advanced technology worldwide.

G+FLAS Life Sciences stated, "With the rapid increase in the number of patients with COVID-19 in the world, we expect that candidates for recombinant vaccines are successfully tested as soon as possible and delivered to those in need." Also, "As a company leading the way in saving lives, we will do our best to make the technology for producing plant-based vaccine candidates a core technology of the country."