Medicago awarded $21 million from the U.S. Department of Defense
Medicago to develop a vaccine facility in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina
Medicago USA Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Medicago Inc., announced that it has been awarded a $21 Million grant from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Broad Agency Announcement (BAA), Defense Sciences Research & Technology to demonstrate the scalable manufacturing of its plant-expressed VLP vaccines in the U.S.A. under a Technology Investment Agreement.
Medicago will develop a 90,000-square-foot cGMP facility in Research Triangle Park (RTP), North Carolina. This state-of-the-art facility will be a large, cost-effective and scaled-up facility for Medicago's VLP plant-based vaccine technology for the delivery of cGMP-grade vaccine. Medicago will scale-up and automate its cGMP process to demonstrate its capacity to produce 10 million doses/month of influenza vaccines with the potential for further expansion in the future.
This DARPA project is an accelerated and integrated effort to deliver effective production of pandemic influenza in the U.S.A. The Accelerated Manufacture of Pharmaceuticals (AMP) program seeks to identify new ways to produce large amounts of high quality vaccine protein in less than 3 months in response to emerging and novel biologic threats. The strategic collaboration is a $42M project in which DARPA contributes $21M, Medicago $7.5M and Alexandria Real Estate Equities Inc. ('Alexandria') $13.5M.
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