BioCina Pty Ltd., a global biologics CDMO, expanded its partnership with GPN Vaccines Ltd., a biotechnology company developing an engineered whole-cell vaccine called Gamma-PN against Streptococcus pneumoniae. This bacterium is responsible for causing life-threatening infections such as pneumonia, bacteremia, and meningitis. GPN’s vaccine technology is an engineered strain of Streptococcus pneumoniae that lacks capsular polysaccharide and expresses surface proteins common to all serotypes, inducing broad-spectrum T- and B-cell immunity to cross-reactive protein antigens of the bacteria, making this vaccine outperform against currently approved vaccines.
 
BioCina will manufacture large-scale cGMP batches for this program. The BioCina facility in Adelaide, Australia has a history of developing and manufacturing recombinant proteins in microbial systems such as E. coli.
 
BioCina’s Chief Executive Officer, Mark W. Womack said, “We are extremely proud that GPN Vaccines has asked us to further scale-up the production of Gamma-PN, which has the potential to protect so many lives against a broad range of serotypes not covered by any current vaccines.”
 
GPN Vaccines’ Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Tim Hirst said, “We are delighted to be progressing with the next stage of cGMP manufacture of our innovative whole cell pneumococcal vaccine, Gamma-PN, with BioCina as the CDMO of choice. They successfully optimized the manufacture of Phase 1 material, and we now look forward to working with them to deliver a scaled-up process for the manufacture of Phase 2 material suitable for clinical evaluation worldwide.”