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In the spring of 2011, Kalon Biotherapeutics, LLC
was formed as a private company by the A&M System.
It was formed to bring about the commercialization of the
National Center for Therapeutics Manufacturing,
which was funded by the Emerging Technology Fund
as the next generation in biotherapeutics manufacturing.
Kalon was formed not around intellectual property but
around a business concept. And what we saw is the next wave
of biotherapeutics manufacturing.
We wanted the NCTM and the company that operated the NCTM
to not just catch up to the east and the west coast
in terms of biologics manufacturing
but surpass them. Go to a place where no one was occupying
in order to capture and monopolize that process.
And that's exactly what we've done.
When we started off the company, we started recruiting
nationally. We realized we needed to bring people that
have big pharm experience, because while Texas has great
people in Texas that know about pharmaceutical manufacturing,
we don't have a wealth of people. So the formation of the
National Center for Therapeutics Manufacturing and the workforce
program that has been wrapped around it has been
incredible from attracting big pharma professional people from
all over the country to our company.
What's really exciting to us that gets us up early in the
morning are the opportunities to really have breakthrough
technology development. For M D Anderson and for others,
cancer therapeutics are becoming more personalized.
The more personalized they are, so one drug, one patient.
The more personalized they are, the higher the
cost of manufacturing is. And therefore, it's less affordable
to more people. However, if you can change the dynamic and you
can take the number of times that you touch the product and
you can automate that process. You can bring the costs of
these personalized vaccines down to a very reasonable and
affordable cost. I believe that's the next wave of
drug development where drugs become more personalized and
that from a manufacturing perspective, we can lower the
overall cost through process automation. I think the spark
of forming Kalon, the spark of forming the Center that resulted
in the BARDA Award will pay significant long-term
dividends for this community as well as the State of Texas
because we're changing the flow of technologies from
historically leaving the state and never coming back to now
staying in the state as well as attracting new flow of
technologies into the state. So that is incredibly exciting for
us and the realm of technologies from microbial to insect cell
to mammalian biologics world is really exciting.