Company

ApoLife, Inc is a privately held biotechnology company that has focused on developing a technology platform based on proprietary yeast (S. cerevisiae) expression systems that accelerate the discovery and development of antibody therapeutics and recombinant proteins.

ApoLife has been successful in receiving competitive grant awards from the National Institute of Health and the Michigan Economic Development Corporation. The company has used these funds to develop the platform technology, the intellectual property, and the technical know-how to advance and participate in the rapidly expanding market for the therapeutic recombinant proteins, monoclonal antibodies (mAb), next generation antibody scaffolds, and biogeneric products including recombinant vaccines.

The company employs Bakers yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, which has been used in manufacturing several FDA approved therapeutic products thereby providing competitive regulatory advantages over other yeast expression systems. By applying ApoLife’s proprietary “Twin Cassette®” expression system, biopharma and biotechnology companies can accelerate the process of bringing the new therapies to market and help reduce healthcare costs.

ApoLife’s Competitive Advantage

Antibody products have proved to be highly successful and profitable therapeutics for cancer, arthritis and other diseases. Combined sales of therapeutic antibody products were $14 billion in 2006 and are expected to grow to $30 billion by 2010 thus driving greater demand for manufacturing technology that can cost-effectively and more rapidly produce recombinant antibodies. A critical factor in the high cost of these drugs is that the cell culture systems currently used for recombinant antibodies are expensive and intrinsically slow.

ApoLife’s yeast system has potential to (I) accelerate antibody screening and the discovery from hybridoma subclones or phage display libraries, and (II) reduce the cost and time of antibody manufacturing. This will eventually allow manufacturers of biotherapeutics to shorten their development cycles from years to months so they can develop new antibody-based therapies faster and get them into clinics more rapidly.