May 21 2020, Melbourne, Australia – Q-Sera Pty Ltd is pleased to announce a collaboration with JHL Biotech, Inc. (Taiwan) to produce high yielding recombinant ecarin for commercial scale production of RAPClot® Rapid Serum tubes. Q-Sera has developed a superior serum/blood clotting tube, RAPClot® Rapid Serum tube, for widespread use in hospitals and pathology labs.
The tubes use a novel class of patented coagulation agents to rapidly clot blood samples to produce serum for analysis. These proteins, found in the venom of some of the world’s deadliest snakes can now be produced at commercial scale from modified cell lines developed by JHL Biotech using standard biotech manufacturing processes.
RAPClot® Rapid Serum blood collection tubes are coated with RAPClot®, recombinant ecarin, resulting in tubes which rapidly produce high quality serum, including for blood samples that contain anti-coagulants. These benefits will provide cost efficiencies for healthcare systems and improved outcomes for patients. JHL Biotech, Inc. has developed a number of proprietary cell lines and associated protein expression technologies to enable Q-Sera to produce its recombinant ecarin, RAPClot®, in higher yields.
The companies have been collaborating under JHL’s partnering program in which it works with companies on products with disruptive potential such as Q-Sera’s RAPClot® Rapid Serum tube. Michael Grant, CEO of Q-Sera, said, “JHL Biotech’s proprietary technology has already been able to demonstrate that we can achieve high yield and low cost production of recombinant ecarin for use in our blood clotting tubes. This is potentially disruptive as Q-Sera seeks to provide a superior replacement for current serum and plasma tubes with the RAPClot®