Empowered Patient Podcast FastPharming Technology Used to Grow Plants for Discovering Developing and Manufacturing New Drug Candidates with Tom Isett iBio
Tom Isett is the CEO of iBio which is pioneering the next generation of biopharmaceuticals. Their goal is to reduce the cost, time, and risk of failure involved with drug discovery and development by using a plant-based recombinant protein manufacturing platform to create small and large batches of desired proteins. Tom shares his career journey from working with the USDA to iBio where he is back to working with the little leafy green guys again.
Tom explains, "We are a biotech, so we're a developer of biopharmaceuticals, specifically focused in oncology, fibrosis, and infectious diseases, where we're really trying to address some of the bigger unmet medical needs out there. But what I think really makes us unique is how we develop these new medicines, molecules, and candidates. We use plants to produce these new drug candidates."
"And as we move forward, we also use artificial intelligence for the design of the molecules. So the combination of the two winds up putting us in the position where we have this really strong design capability. Given the nature of our plant-based production system and the technologies that we employ, we get a certain speed component, so we can do it more quickly than other manufacturing systems. This is why we call the technology FastPharming."
"This FastPharming system just uses plants. It's actually a relative of tobacco. It was originally from Australia, a little weed, and we like that because it grows quickly and it puts most of its energy into its leaves. So, we skip that whole step of all this time it takes to get it to produce the protein of interest."
#iBio #FastPharming #ProteinDrugs #Biopharmaceuticals #DrugManufacturing #BioProcessing #Pharmatech #AI