New Company Will Develop Instrumentation for the Life Sciences

Falmouth, Mass. – (April 30, 2012) -- AVIA Biosystems announced today (Apr. 30) that it has been awarded a $1.25M Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant from the National Institutes of Health. The award supports the development of instrumentation to measure the stability of biotherapeutics.

AVIA Biosystems will design, develop, manufacture and sell new laboratory instrumentation for the bioanalytical and biophysical characterization of proteins and other biologics. The instrument being developed in this SBIR supported program will be AVIA’s first commercial product.

“This platform will significantly accelerate the development of new protein therapeutics,” said Dr. Richard K. Brown, president of AVIA Biosystems. “We greatly anticipate its introduction, and the benefits it will bring to the biopharmaceutical community.” Protein therapeutics, the fastest growing segment in the biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries, account for annual sales totaling over $70 billion. The category includes monoclonal antibodies, recombinant proteins, chimeric proteins and other protein receptor constructs.

Formulation of proteins in a safe and stable form is a major hurdle in the development of these types of pharmaceuticals. Identifying the conditions that maximize stability and minimize protein aggregation is critical during development and often requires the evaluation of hundreds of conditions. This time-consuming task is made even more difficult by the lack of automated instruments capable of accurately measuring the relative stabilities of large numbers of proteins in solution.

AVIA Biosystems plans a fully automated instrument aimed at measuring multi-dimensional protein stability and aggregation matrices that will be capable of automatically preparing and analyzing enough samples to complete an entire formulations study for a new biologic drug.

Providing a rapid and cost-effective means to automatically conduct an entire study at relevant temperatures (storage and biological) will provide a practical method for researchers to test more formulations and to select the formulation that is optimal for any specific biologic.