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Tailor-made protein engineering for companies and research organisations

Country of Origin: Czech Republic
Reference Number: TOCZ20190529001
Publication Date: 10 June 2019

Summary

A Czech biotech SME offers its expertise in protein engineering, computational approaches and related state-of-the-art software tools. They provide powerful protein optimization services e.g. thermal stabilization of proteins for medical applications or effective enzymes for production of fine chemicals. Partners sought are companies or R&D organisations utilising such proteins in their industrial processes or within research projects for commercial or research cooperation agreement.

Description

The company was founded as a spin-off from one of the most renowned Czech universities in the field of life sciences in 2006. 

The Company has a tailored technology platform to engineer more stable proteins and enzymes. The solutions commercially offered are both cost- and time-effective. Instead of screening thousands of random proteins, the technology platform and its state-of-the-art in silico tools (virtual modelling in PC) for protein mutation prediction enable to design protein variants with improved properties quickly and reliably. Just a handful of variants are usually needed to get the desired result.

The company targets R&D teams working within both private companies and public research organisations and seeks a collaboration on contract basis or within a research consortium.

Each cooperation is treated as a separate project with given milestones and estimated costs for each milestone. Project team communicates with the customer/partner on regular basis to make sure that there is a mutual agreement on the next steps to be taken and related costs and risks.

For example, as a contract research provider, the company developed a series of thermostable mycotoxin degrading enzymes as animal feed additives for a customer. Also, the company develops its own hyper-stable Fibroblast Growth Factors (FGF proteins) under the prestigious EU H2020 SME Instrument phase 2 grant scheme. Stable FGF proteins are now sold globally under the distribution agreement with a major US-based biotech company.

Advantages and Innovations

The company team has the following unique combination of qualities:
- the ability to combine the best computational SW tools with wet-lab experimental work for delivering high performing proteins and enzymes
- proprietary technology platform combining evolutionary phylogenetic analysis with energy calculations for protein stabilization (able to enhance most proteins in less than 3 months with over 60 % success rate)
- the access to state-of-the-art software tools for designing and engineering of proteins
- the expertise in various methods used to characterization of protein structures and functions
- experience in recombinant protein production and development of biocatalytic processes.

Stage Of Development

Already on the market

Stage Of Development Comment

The technology is fully tested and has been validated in several application fields.

Requested partner

Partner sought: A company or a research institute with a need of a specific protein or enzyme to be stabilized or optimized. 

The Czech Company would like to work with its partners on long-term basis, either on contract basis (commercial agreement with technical assistance) or within research consortium research cooperation agreement).

The partnership would utilise the company´s R&D and manufacturing competencies/capacities.

It is expected that certain technical knowledge would be transferred towards to partners.

The application fields are very broad - the company has collaborated with partners from the fields of environmental biotechnology, military research, diagnostics, healthcare, cosmetics, pharmacology, food additives and agriculture. The company has also collaborated with various public research institutions within funded (international) R&D projects where its know-how has been utilised to reach common goals. Thus, new partners might be active in the above-mentioned fields, but also in other relevant ones.

Cooperation offer is closed for requests