http://youtu.be/7INgGJY-ht4
Shares in Newark-based biotech company iBIO were on roll for a time.
After slumping to about 70 cents a share in June, the company saw its stock price rise to $1.46 as of Thursday. It settled back to $1.35 a share on Friday and dropped again another 12.6 percent to $1.18.
The company Thursday announced a broadening of the alliance with the health care business of GE. The deal is aimed at commercializing iBIO’s plant-based technologies in manufacturing drugs and vaccines.
The alliance builds on the existing development and marketing agreement between the two companies announced in 2010 and taps into GE Healthcare’ capabilities in pharmaceutical manufacturing.
iBio’s research and development collaborator, Fraunhofer USA Center for Molecular Biotechnology (CMB), also in Newark, will continue to play a key role in advancing the iBioLaunch platform, the companies said. Financial terms were not disclosed.
The platform uses plants tended by robots to rapidly produce high levels of proteins such as vaccines. The alliance with GE Healthcare will work to develop a manufacturing process that would lower capital and operating costs of the plant-based system, with the goal of reducing the amount of time it takes to get vaccine into production.
Worldwide demand for biopharmaceuticals and vaccines is increasing dramatically, driven by ageing populations and
the global effort to reduce the incidence of vaccine preventable diseases, iBIO and GE noted. – Doug Rainey
