About GlycoBac

GlycoBac, LLC, is a Wyoming biotech company that provides engineered insect cells and baculovirus vectors as a new production platform for the production of biologics.

Biologics are high-value drugs, such as cancer-fighting antibodies or drugs that combat genetic diseases, such as diabetes and anemia. Unlike conventional drugs, biologics are produced using living cell systems that have been genetically engineered to produce a specific product. Importantly, most biologics are protein molecules with sugars attached, and they must have the correct sugar structures to maximize their their therapeutic benefits.

Today, most biologics are produced in mammalian cell systems, such as hamster or mouse cells. However, there are several problems with this approach:

• 1. It takes a long time to isolate cells capable of producing a particular biologic

  2. mammalian cells sometimes add certain sugars to biologics that can trigger allergic reactions

  3. mammalian cells sometimes harbor undetected infectious agents, such as live viruses, which can persist in the final product, potentially harming patients

Insect cells are an emerging, alternative production platform, which has none of these disadvantages. However, until now, insect cells could not be used to produce biologics because they could not add the correct sugars needed to produce clinically effective biologics.

Dr. Donald L. Jarvis, Professor of Molecular Biology at the University of Wyoming, and his research team have studied insect cell pathways involved in biologics production for nearly 25 years. They have used the knowledge gained from this, and other research to develop technology that can be used to improve the insect cell platform for biologics production. This technology, termed glyco-engineering, focuses on modifying insect cells in ways that enable them to add the correct sugars to biologics.

Hence, GlycoBac offers glyco-engineered insect cell platforms that can be used to produce biologics with the types of sugars needed to ensure their clinical efficacy. GlycoBac also can readily produce new glyco-engineered insect cell lines that are custom-designed to produce biologics containing specific, desirable sugar constellations. GlycoBac can perform lab scale biologic production and characterization experiments to assess the performance of their platform in context of specific biologics. Finally, GlycoBac can provide education and training in the application of its novel insect cell platform for biologics production.