Just over a month after hitting a "major milestone" through an $18 million contract for one of its protein manufacturing technologies, Rio Rancho-based life sciences startup Nature's Toolbox (NTx) landed another federally funded contract under a government vaccine production program.
The contract, awarded under the Vaccines on Demand program from the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), will see the Rio Rancho company partner with Houston Methodist Hospital to test its "NTxscribe" platform. That platform is a "continuous-flow" system used to manufacture messenger RNA — a genetic material that tells your body how to make proteins.
Specifically, one of the NTxscribe systems will be placed on-site at a production facility at Houston Methodist Hospital (HMH) "to demonstrate that the team at HMH can actually use our system to produce material with high quality," Alexander Koglin, Ph.D., president and chief science officer for NTx, said. The hospital — the second largest in the Houston area according to Houston Business Journal research — has an advanced RNA-based cancer vaccine program called the Center for RNA Therapeutics that the NTxscribe platform could help to produce its RNA-based products, he added.
"These units will change the way in which RNA drugs are developed and distributed, so as to democratize RNA therapeutics," John Cooke, Ph.D., the center's director, said in a statement.
Koglin added that working with HMH through the BARDA contract could also help prepare Nature's Toolbox for scaling its platform for pandemic response vaccine production. While reaching that scale could take some time, he said preparing the platform for pandemic response "was always on the table."
"The traditional batch processes for developing vaccines and other biologics are burdensome and cannot be scaled quickly in the event of an emergency," Jamie Coffin, Ph.D., NTx's CEO, said in a statement. "Over the course of this project, we will aim to prove that NTxscribe can help BARDA meet its goals toward decentralized and rapidly deployable vaccine manufacturing."
The company didn't disclose how much funding it will receive through the contract, but a Thursday news release notes the project is funded in whole or in part with federal funding from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
Nature's Toolbox was familiar with Cooke, the director of HMH's Center for RNA Therapeutics, prior to working with the center under the contract, Koglin said.
"It was, if you want, a natural match," he added. "Somebody who has experience and an interest and drives this forward with personalized, RNA-based therapeutics with our system to combine to really support the work he's doing, and on the other hand also his interest in becoming a response center for pandemic response."
Being awarded the BARDA contract comes during a period of growth for the Rio Rancho startup. It was named as a partner on a four-year, $18 million Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) awarded to Boston-based biotech company Ginkgo Bioworks (NYSE: DNA) in early August. A few "very large to large" pharmaceutical companies contacted NTx after being named on that contract, Coffin, the startup's CEO, said at the time.
He added that NTx is "going to be in hyper growth mode," with plenty of hiring and physical expansion planned over the next year. It has around 40 employees now but could grow to over 100 in that span of time, Coffin said.
Houston Methodist Hospital, NTx's partner under the BARDA contract, opened a tech hub at a Houston-based incubator in late August, Houston Inno reported. The system is also working on a ninth hospital that could come with some advanced health care-focused technologies, the Houston Business Journal wrote in February.
