Nomad Bioscience: new plant biotechnology company founded to focus on biomaterials and biopharmaceuticals

24-09-2008: NOMAD Bioscience GmbH, Munich, Germany (NOMAD) is a private biotechnology company developing plant-made biomaterials and biopharmaceuticals that address critical unmet needs. NOMAD is developing a series of high-value products such as nanopatterned materials, protein scaffolds and templates, proteins and enzymes for important markets including biofuels, electric batteries, and biopharmaceuticals.

Nomad's plant-based protein expression technologies are being licensed from several companies for a broad range of products. NOMAD's proprietary technologies further improve the upstream part of the manufacturing process, but most importantly, they provide for novel downstream solutions that together with the in-licensed upstream components should result in a superior fully integrated manufacturing process for most of NOMAD's intended products. Another major focus of NOMAD are innovations that provide for full integration of the novel process components and novel product parts into existing industrial processes/products.

NOMAD's biomaterial pipeline consists of several selected product candidates, including plant-made cellulase enzymes (expected impact: up to 30% lower manufacturing cost of bioethanol), nanostructured polyadsorbents for affinity purification of biopharmaceuticals (low cost polyaffinity nanoparticles that replace expensive current affinity resins) and nanopatterned electrodes (batteries with improved electrochemical cycling properties and electrode capacity).

NOMAD's pharmaceutical portfolio is focused on three biosimilar versions of the proteins: Insulin, Etanercept (Enbrel®), and Trastuzumab (Herceptin®).

The founder of NOMAD is Prof. Dr. Yuri Gleba. Prior to founding NOMAD in 2008, Dr. Gleba co-founded two other biotech companies, Icon Genetics (Germany, USA) and Phytomedics (USA). He has been the CEO of Icon Genetics since its inception in 1999 and he has brought it to a successful exit in 2006 by selling the company to Bayer AG; he continues to manage it now.