DARPA awards fourth milestone payment of $3.56M to Medicago

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 fourth milestone payment of US$3.56 million from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency ("DARPA"). This is part of the potential US$21 million DARPA milestone awards to be earned by Medicago to demonstrate the scalable manufacturing of its plant-expressed VLP vaccines in the U.S.A. under a Technology Investment Agreement. Medicago has now received US$19.8 million to date for this project, with two milestones remaining.

"Continuing to successfully advance this technology-transfer project is a further demonstration of our robust science and manufacturing platform, and our strong North American team," said Mike Wanner, Vice President U.S. Operations of Medicago USA. "This milestone focused on completing documentation related to a phased commissioning approach to the cGMP facility and equipment, as well as results from recent engineering runs in Research Triangle Park (RTP), North Carolina. Our U.S. vaccine facility began operations in September 2011, and we continue to expect to complete the fifth and sixth milestones related to this project in the first half of 2012."

Medicago previously signed a US$21 million Technology Investment Agreement with DARPA to develop a 97,000-square-foot vaccine facility in Research Triangle Park (RTP), North Carolina. This state of-the-art facility is a large, cost-effective and scaled-up facility for Medicago's VLP plant-based vaccine technology, ultimately for the delivery of current good manufacturing practice (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.