NEW YORK – Oxford Nanopore Technologies said Tuesday that it has forged a partnership with Swiss biotech manufacturing firm Lonza to develop a nanopore sequencing-based quality control test for mRNA manufacturing.
Financial details of the deal were not disclosed.
The collaboration aims to commercialize a current good manufacturing practice (cGMP)-validated test to analyze several quality attributes of mRNA products by directly sequencing both the DNA template and the messenger RNA.
Oxford Nanopore will develop the mRNA QC test in-house using its GridIon sequencing platform and transfer the workflows to Lonza for GMP validation. Following successful validation, Lonza plans to include the sequencing technology in its analytical development workflow while supporting Oxford Nanopore to achieve quality requirements for QC compliance.
Lonza will pre-validate several quality attributes of mRNA products for the test at its analytical development laboratory in Geleen, Netherlands, and will validate the method at QC laboratories on the same site.
Once commercialized, the test aims to "substantially reduce" the time for mRNA quality control testing, delivering a "significant competitive advantage" for the manufacture of mRNA products, Oxford Nanopore said.