COLLABORATIONS Under contract with biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies, GTC Biotherapeutics (GTC) is producing transgenic versions of breakthrough therapeutics, particularly monoclonal-antibody-based drugs, to treat chronic and debilitating diseases such as autoimmune and neurological disorders and HIV/AIDS. Transgenic production offers collaborators potential benefits such as the ability to produce hard-to-express and complex proteins in quantities needed for clinical trials, flexibility in the timing and magnitude of capital investments for scale-up and production, a decrease in the overall capital and manufacturing costs compared to cell culture and other production systems, resulting in the overall ability to produce large quantities of therapeutic proteins in a cost-effective manner. GTC is currently producing therapeutic proteins via transgenic technology for commercial partners in exchange for revenues in the form of up-front payments, milestone payments, success fees, capital investment and in some cases, royalties and equity. GTC is currently developing transgenic versions of monoclonal antibodies and fusion proteins for biotechnology and pharmaceutical innovators such as Abbott Labs, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Centocor, Elan Pharmaceuticals, and Progenics. These firms currently are conducting human clinical trials with cell-culture produced versions of their proteins and have contracted with GTC to evaluate the advantages of producing their products via transgenic technology. For proteins currently derived from pooled human plasma, transgenic production provides a product source that would be unconstrained by the availability and safety of human blood and offers an attractive, cost-effective production method at large-scale volume to meet market demand. GTC has formed collaborations for the transgenic production of marketed products currently derived from human plasma such as recombinant human albumin in collaboration with Fresenius AG.
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