Medicago CEO "years ahead" of competitors

By Solarina Ho

TORONTO (Reuters) - Canada's Medicago Inc MDG.TO is several years ahead of its competitors in the development and means to produce plant-based vaccines to respond rapidly to new strains of influenza, its CEO said on Tuesday.

The company said earlier on Tuesday that it had been awarded a $21 million grant from the U.S. Department of Defense to build a facility that can mass-produce its influenza vaccines, but shares plunged nearly 18 percent following the announcement of a $7 million equity offering.

The offering, which entails selling up to 17,283,952 units at 40.5 cents a unit, will partly be used to help fund the Defense Department project.

"In general terms, we've probably got several years ahead of most of the people that might be doing similar things," Chief Executive Andy Sheldon told Reuters in an interview.

Medicago says it can produce a vaccine for testing a month or less after the identification of a strain. It says its plant-based vaccine technologies could offer speed and cost benefits compared with traditional vaccine production.

The defense department project will consist of developing a 90,000 square-foot facility in North Carolina designed to produce up to 10 million doses of flu vaccines a month, with the potential for further expansion in the future.

"The capital expense to build such a facility -- we would generally estimate that it's somewhere between 10 to 15 times less than if was an egg-based or cell-culture facility," said Sheldon, adding that the cost of goods is also much less than egg-based or cell-based production.

Sheldon says there's a need for faster production technology, noting that during the previous pandemic, it took companies about six months from the time of the pandemic announcement to be able to supply the vaccines.