With biomanufacturing often a limiting factor for drug developers, Canada’s Future Fields is heralding its bug-based approach to protein production as a potential salve.
Now, after several years spent validating its manufacturing platform, the company is expanding in a big way with the debut of a new service line and factory in downtown Edmonton in the Canadian province of Alberta.
Dubbed Instar 1.0, Future Fields’ new 6,000-square-foot facility will allow clients to pursue custom protein production in exotic cell lines like neurons, brain cells and more to foster next-generation research into diseases like multiple sclerosis and Alzheimer’s, the company explained in a release.
Notably, the site will leverage Future Fields’ bespoke EntoEngine platform, which utilizes fruit flies, a.k.a. Drosophila melanogaster, as expression hosts to help crank out challenging recombinant proteins at scale.
“We were founded on the belief that biology can be used as a tool to solve the world’s biggest problems, whether that’s around sustainability, food insecurity [or] making new treatments that are going to save people’s lives,” Future Fields’ co-founder and CEO, Matt Anderson-Baron, Ph.D., said in a recent interview with Fierce Pharma.
“We realized very early on that in order for a lot of the new bio innovations coming out—whether it was cultured meat or cell therapies—to really have an impact and be meaningful, we had to solve biomanufacturing.”
While yeast and E. coli are good candidates for manufacturing simple proteins, they lack the machinery to make complex products. Mammalian cells, on the other hand, can make more complex proteins but often run into cost inefficiencies at scale, Future Fields explains on its website.
“The original impetus was always around getting outside of the tank, getting out of a single-cell solution where you’re growing a single-cell type in a bioreactor,” Anderson-Baron said.
Within the EntoEngine, Future Fields has come up with a method to express a protein within any specific cell type of a fly—rather than the whole genetically engineered fly—which the company says gives it the ability to target over 200 exotic cell types needed to assist with production of new and potentially breakthrough proteins.
Additionally, given that fruit flies reproduce quickly and do not need the same amount of electricity and water as traditional protein production methods, Future Fields’ new factory is expected to yield much more protein in a shorter timespan with considerably less environmental impact, the company explained in its release.
The facility itself is expected to emit 86% less carbon and use 74% less water than conventional methods, the company explained, citing third-party environmental assessments.
Further, Future Fields has generated data that its EntoEngine can achieve a Chinese Hamster Ovarian (CHO)-equivalent production benchmark of up to 305 grams per liter. All told, the company figures the technology on offer at the factory will be about 30 times as efficient as traditional biomanufacturing systems.
As for how Future Fields’ fruit fly process works, the company stably inserts the gene for a particular protein into the genome of the insect at the embryonic stage, Anderson-Baron explained. That gene is then passed on to the fly’s offspring, allowing for rapid propagation.
“Once we create that strain, we can scale it up and produce a lot of biomass very, very quickly,” the CEO said.
Next, Future Fields harvests the biomass via the larvae, processes it, and then filters and clarifies the resultant lysate for downstream purification.
Everything downstream of that is analogous to or the same as traditional systems, Anderson-Baron added, noting that the company hasn’t had to “innovate across the entire production chain.”
Over the past three-and-a-half years, Future Fields has largely been focused on developing a repeatable manufacturing process, Anderson-Baron said. The company now has 30 projects in development, primarily through clients working with difficult proteins they’re unable to make in-house.
While Anderson-Baron couldn’t divulge many details, he did note that Future Fields counts at least one top 10 drugmaker among its rolodex of current customers. Future Fields is working with that unnamed company to manufacture a preclinical protein, he said.
The company currently expects Instar 1.0 to be operational by the end of the year, with plans to ramp up to full capacity over the course of about 12 to 18 months. Once fully up and running, the facility will be able to churn out around three kilos of purified recombinant protein product each year, Future Fields has said.
The plant will employ more than 20 technicians, chemists and biomolecular specialists, many of whom will be new hires, Anderson-Baron pointed out. The company currently employs 34 staffers, mostly in R&D and product development, he added.
Anderson-Baron also believes the North American facility could attract clients concerned about the BIOSECURE Act, a piece of proposed legislation that has threatened to cut off certain Chinese contractors and service providers from the U.S. life sciences market.
He pointed to a protein engineering conference he attended earlier in the year, during which many new drug developers expressed that they were already on the hunt for alternative manufacturers.
“I think everyone was kind of on edge and nobody is looking to work with some of those more traditional offshore partners because of what’s coming,” Anderson-Baron said. “We’ve been aware of that, and I think that’s created more tailwinds for companies like ours in the larger biomanufacturing space.”