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Addressing human & animal health together
Addressing Africa’s challenges with cutting-edge technology
Vaccines and diagnostics are highly effective in the prevention, control, and treatment of disease, but are often expensive for developing countries. Unreliable supplies, transportation systems, and storage facilities also make it difficult to preserve high-quality vaccines that require refrigeration. In addition, due to diverging disease priorities between developed and developing countries, the vaccine and diagnostics needs of developing countries are not being met.
Therefore, there is a gap in the market to address animal and human health needs of developing countries. Across the African continent, this market-gap remains as the number and variety of manufacturers is too limited to satisfy the health needs of the entire continent. The COVID19 pandemic further exposed this glaring disparity in local manufacturing capacity.
Smart Biotech has exclusive licenses to several recombinant protein products, technical knowledge, and intellectual property relating to protein production using plant-based expression systems.
Tackling zoonotic diseases that put human and animal health at risk
Zoonotic diseases are those that mainly infect animals, but can spread to humans through contact with animals or animal products. Some well-known examples are influenza, salmonellosis, brucellosis, and diphtheria. Our current projects focus two of these that are prevalent in Africa and the rest of the world, namely avian influenza and brucellosis.
By developing technologies that tackle local challenges but have a worldwide market, we ensure the sustainability of our business while helping the people, particularly smallholders, who are often left behind by the developed world’s R&D into problems unique to their challenges.
Harnessing the productive power of plants
The story begins over 20 years ago – seeing the potential of plant-based expression systems as a disruptive technology to making biological products.
By 2015, the viability of plant expression technology had been proven as a concept in South Africa and serendipitously, all these local opportunities were in the animal health space. This marked the beginnings of Smart Biotech.
Smart Biotech recognised a great opportunity to introduce a new technology capable of making a significant socio-economic impact on animal health and the management of livestock, especially for smallholder farmers.
Plant-based manufacturing: How does it work?
Ever wonder how proteins are manufactured for use in medicines, diagnostics, and vaccines? The very first manufactured protein was produced in E. coli (a bacterium), but since then proteins have been produced in yeast, mammalian, insect, and plant cells. Our technology uses a transient genetic transformation system to give plants the (temporary) ability to produce our specific protein. After several weeks of growing, the plants are harvested and our protein is purified, ready to use for further applications.
Our Projects
