Medicago receives $3.8M as second milestone payment from U.S. DARPA for cGMP vaccine facility

Medicago USA Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Medicago Inc. (TSX: MDG), a biotechnology company focused on developing highly effective and competitive vaccines based on proprietary manufacturing technologies and Virus-Like Particles (VLPs), today announced it has received the second milestone payment of US$3.8 million from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency ("DARPA"). This is part of the US$21M DARPA grant awarded to Medicago to demonstrate the scalable manufacturing of its plant-expressed VLP vaccines in the U.S.A. under a Technology Investment Agreement. Medicago has received US$10.7 million to date for this project.

"The ability to build a state-of-the-art vaccine facility in just one year requires a great technology, solving novel engineering problems, and a solid team," said Mike Wanner, Vice President U.S. Operations of Medicago USA. "We have met all milestones to date and our U.S. vaccine facility is projected to be operational during the second half of 2011."

On August 2010, Medicago received a US$21M grant from DARPA to develop a 90,000-square-foot cGMP facility in Research Triangle Park (RTP), North Carolina, which is currently under construction. This state of-the-art facility will be a large, cost-effective and scaled-up facility for Medicago's VLP plant-based vaccine technology for the delivery of cGMP-grade vaccine. Medicago intends to demonstrate its capacity to produce 10 million doses/month of influenza vaccines with the potential for further expansion in the future. This DARPA project is part of the Blue Angel influenza vaccine rapid response demonstration project which seeks to identify new ways to produce large amounts of high quality vaccine grade protein in less than 3 months in response to emerging and novel biologic threats.