4.28.23-Korea-Sunflower-Therapeutics

LAURA CROWELL: All right, good morning, everyone. My name is Laura Crowell. I am the Director of Research and Development at Sunflower Therapeutics. At Sunflower we're working on developing protein manufacturing solutions for anyone to use anywhere. Proteins have become really important in health and science. They can be used as treatments, as vaccines, but also as reagents in the manufacturing of newer modalities, like mRNA vaccines, and in alternative food products, nutraceuticals, and even cosmetics.

So I'll start by telling you a little bit about Sunflower. We were founded out of Professor Christopher Love's Lab at MIT, who sends his regrets that he was not able to join us today. And we also have some affiliations with other MIT graduates, including from the Sloan Business School. Our technology is focused around a breakthrough automated and flexible, small footprint manufacturing system that uses microbial hosts such as yeast cells.

We're a women-owned and led public benefit corporation that has been profitable since our operationalization in 2019. Our first product is called the Daisy Petal. It's a single use bioreactor system. And we've successfully delivered this to early access customers.

We also do commercial contracts with a variety of companies, including multinational biopharma companies, startups, and academia. So far we've completed two major projects with the US government and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, in addition to eight other projects with commercial customers. The problem we're trying to solve is that conventional protein manufacturing looks like this. It's done in very large plants with complex technology.

It requires significant upfront capital and space and a highly trained workforce. Our goal is to democratize protein manufacturing, to make it more accessible so that everyone around the world can benefit from proteins as a product. The first choice when you're trying to make a protein is what host organism, or what cells you're going to use to make your protein.

We work with eukaryotic microbes, because we believe they enable simplicity in a variety of aspects of our process. This can be due to their very fast growth. We can do rapid design cycles, testing lots of different things in a short period of time.

Eukaryotic microbes like yeast are also able to secrete the protein, so spit it outside of the cell at a very high initial purity. This allows us to make simplified purification processes, and processes that are platformable across many different proteins. When we have these platformable processes for protein manufacturing, we can actually deploy them on next generation equipment, which is what Sunflower has been developing.

Our equipment is flexible, scalable, and user-friendly. We currently have two biomanufacturing systems. The first is the Daisy Petal, which is a single-use benchtop bioreactor system made for continuous protein production using perfusion fermentation. The system is fully automated and enables you to produce up to grams of protein per week with only a 1 liter working volume bioreactor.

On the right-hand side is our Dahlia System. This is an end-to-end solution for protein manufacturing. It includes a module for fermentation using a bioreactor, but also modules for chromatographic purification, formulation using tangential flow filtration, and refrigerated collection. Again the system is fully automated. And we estimate that you can produce about 10 kilograms of purified protein annually in a footprint of only 50 meters squared.

We were able to demonstrate a couple of different protein products made on the Beta 2 prototype of our Dalia System last year. Here we made GCSF, a cytokine, as well as a protein subunit vaccine for COVID-19. In less than one week we were able to make thousands or tens of thousands of dose equivalents of these products, and we analyzed the typical things that you would look at for clinical safety, such as host cell DNA and host cell protein, and bioburden as well.

So we're here today because we're seeking Korean partners for early deployment of our hardware and manufacturing approach. We know that Korea is uniquely suited to become a global biomanufacturing hub, producing proteins and other products for Asian countries as well as countries all around the world. We're looking for organizations that are from lots of different types, biopharma companies, biotech companies, research institutions. If you're interested in making proteins we want to help you.

So please come talk to me later today and I'd be happy to answer any questions then. Thank you very much.