Redbiotec

Redbiotec is a small company located near Zurich spun out from ETH in 2006 by Christian Schaub and Dr. Corinne John and is focused on developing vaccines (currently their pipeline is all preclinical).

Redbiotec develops virus-like particles (VLPs) which are non-replicating and allow surface protein expression, thus making them very useful as vaccines. Redbiotec constructs the VLPs using a co-expression system. Usually when proteins are expressed in the lab a one-promoter one-protein one-plasmid system is used. If you want to express several proteins together you can try to find enough plasmids which are compatible or you can try and put all the proteins into one plasmid. I have done multi-expression before, using a promoter and an IRES sequence in E. coli and it worked very well.

The Redbiotec system is based on the MultiBac system developed at ETH and you can express up to 10 different proteins with specific promoters (doesn't look like a system that utilizes IRES so it could probably be better controlled). It is based on the baculovirus expression system where protein is expressed in insect cells. One thing that isn't really detailed is what exactly goes into the virus like particle. Can the system express membrane bound proteins and are they working on this? Some of the viruses they are developing vaccines for are enveloped.

Redbiotec is funded in part by the venture capitalist group Redalpine. I see that the 3D microculture company InSphero I wrote about earlier is also funded by Redalpine. In addition to their own vaccine pipeline, Redbiotec also partners with other pharma and biotech companies. They describe their work in three general areas, vaccines, using the VLPs to help cancer therapeutics and to develop VLPs that express targets for antibody engineering.