There’s a new platform for a potential Covid-19 vaccine under development. US biotech company Dyadic has tied up with Bangalore-based Syngene, a subsidiary of Biocon, to develop a Covid vaccine that can protect against the emerging variants of concern, and be manufactured affordably at a large scale. The vaccine will be developed using Dyadic’s proprietary C1-cell protein production platform. Dyadic is developing what it believes will be a potentially significant biopharmaceutical gene expression platform, based on the fungus Thermothelomyces heterothallica or C1. The C1 microorganism has the potential to be further developed into a safe and efficient expression system that may help speed up the development, lower production costs and improve the performance of biologic vaccines and drugs at flexible commercial scales. Mark Emalfarb, Dyadic’s founder and chief executive officer, said “If successful, such vaccines can be manufactured rapidly and affordably, in very large quantities. Our collaboration with Syngene is an appropriate follow-up to our partnership with Medytox in Korea and southeast Asia, and we continue to explore similar arrangements in other geographies to help bring high volume, low-cost, next generation vaccine and drug manufacturing to parts of the world that need these resources most urgently.”