4.4.23-Health-Sunflower-Therapeutics

LAURA CROWELL: Hi, everyone. I'm Laura. I'm going to talk to you a little bit about Sunflower therapeutics, where we are developing protein manufacturing solutions for anyone to use anywhere. Recombinant proteins have become pretty ubiquitous in science and healthcare. They're used for treatment, for vaccines. They're used as reagents in the manufacturing of more complicated biologics, like cell and gene therapies. They're also used in wellness products, in alternative foods, and nutraceuticals. So there's a wide need to make lots of proteins.

A little bit about Sunflower-- our technology is centered around an automated and flexible small-footprint manufacturing system that utilizes microbial hosts. We're a woman-owned and led public benefit corporation that has been profitable since our operationalization in 2019. Our first product, called the Daisy Petal is a single-use bioreactor system. And that has successfully been deployed to some early access customers.

In addition, we've completed two major projects with the DOD and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation as well as eight additional projects with commercial customers. These include a wide range of people, like large biopharm, but also startups and academic institutions.

The problem that we're trying to solve is that conventional protein manufacturing looks like this. It's done in a really big plant. You need specialized equipment, a lot of space, a lot of money, and a lot of people with very specific knowledge in how to run these technologies. Our goal is to democratize protein manufacturing using simple processes and user friendly equipment. So if you were here this morning, you might have heard a little bit from Chris Love about how important alternative hosts can be in manufacturing recombinant proteins. We take advantage of eukaryotic microbes, such as the yeast, pichia pastorius, to enable simplicity in our processes.

Pichia can grow really fast and has a very tractable genome. So that means that we can do a lot of rapid design cycles on our proteins to see which strains can make the protein the best. These types of organisms also have fewer impurities and have a very consistent expression profile, which means that we can create platformable processes that are applicable to lots of different types of proteins. And ultimately, these platformable processes can be deployed on next generation equipment, which is flexible, scalable, and user friendly.

So far at Sunflower we've developed two different scales of biomanufacturing systems that are really staged to grow production capacity. Our first system is the Daisy Petal. It's a single-use bioreactor that's meant to fit in a discovery or R&D lab on the benchtop. And it utilizes continuous operation for microbial cells. Using this approach, You can make a lot more protein in a relatively small footprint.

Our Dahlia system is a slightly larger scale, end-to-end manufacturing system for creating bulk protein. So it includes modules for fermentation using a bioreactor, but also for purification via straight-through chromatography, formulation using TFF, and ultimately a refrigerated collection unit. Both of our systems are completely automated. So a user walks up, installs the single-use consumable set, uploads their recipe, puts their cells in, and hits Go, comes back some number of days later, and there are cells from the bioreactor, or there is fully formulated protein waiting for you in the collection fridge.

This is just a little bit of data from some demonstrations we did with our Dahlia prototype system last year. We were able to make two different proteins that were kind of very high quality and I'll point out. We actually made these in a bare warehouse. This was not done in any kind of regulated pharmaceutical space. And those of you who are experts will notice that the bioburden here was 0. So this is really a great testimony to the fact that single-use consumable sets might allow us to operate in very unique environments in the future.

We work with a lot of different kinds of companies, people in biotech, people working on animal vaccines for foods or nutraceuticals. And what we're really looking for today is more partners, people who are interested in early hardware access for both the Daisy Petal and the Dahlia system. And we also offer some services for process development and strain development for people who want to explore alternative hosts as a mode for making their recombinant proteins.

So if you have any questions, come visit me at my table in the other room during the lunch break. Thanks.