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BRYAN, Tex. (KBTX) - Nearly 500 people have died from coronavirus so far around the world. The latest data shows more than 24,000 are infected.
As concerns about the Coronavirus spread worldwide, iBio in Bryan hopes to be part of the solution. The company is now at the center of developing and testing a potential vaccine.
iBio is expediting their work to find a treatment.
The company uses tobacco-related plants and a process called FastPharming. They grow plants under lights and then use bacteria to engineer the plants for vaccine development.
"What's so important about what iBio can do here is that we make our products very, very quickly so the platform lends itself to a rapid production of both vaccines as well as therapeutics in this case we're focusing on the vaccine," said Tom Isett, iBio Managing Director.
Isett says they are partnering with a Chinese company to develop and test a new vaccine for Coronavirus.
"So in Bryan, this is really the hub of where ultimately a vaccine could be produced using the technology from our Chinese partner or from other customers that we might have that want to use our manufacturing platform to produce a therapeutic," said Isett. "But for right now we're getting in the gene sequence and have it actually. We're going to use that to begin to produce a vaccine candidate and group of candidates for testing."
"The Brazos Valley is very much involved in solving many of the world's problems and I think iBio and this vaccine for the coronavirus is just another example of how the Brazos Valley and the talent pool comes and the industry partners and the community comes together," said Matt Prochaska, Brazos Valley Economic Development Corporation President and CEO.
"It’s been really great to have a partner like iBio here. iBio is a plant-based company and one of the things that they're looking at is how do they solve the problem to create a vaccine that would come from a relative of a tobacco plant," said Prochaska.
Before it was iBio, the facility was built to respond to global threats like a flu pandemic.
"So the building and the manufacturing capability as well as iBio's technology, something that we call FastPharming it uses plants and it's fast, were combined together here with the capabilities to be able to offer those rapid responses," said Isett. "And that's, of course, coming into play right here in Bryan, Texas right now in response to this global pandemic threat with the coronavirus."
The big question is how long is the timeline for finding a vaccine? Isett said they hope to have something that can be manufactured in several months.
But there's no guarantee.
“Well there’s no guarantees that it's going to work so the research has to occur and that’s what’s transpiring now and what’s so important about this is the faster you can get into testing and animals and then ultimately release something to people the better," Isett said.
Using FastPharming technology, iBio has also been able to create antibody candidates for Ebola and Dengue fever.
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