Shares of iBio Inc. (NYSE: IBIO) jumped on Tuesday after the company provided an update on its COVID-19 vaccine manufacturing capacity. At the same time, the company said that it has joined the National Institute for Innovation in Manufacturing Biopharmaceuticals (NIIMBL).

Management noted that if iBio’s own proprietary SARS-CoV-2 Virus-Like Particle (VLP) program, IBIO-200, results in an approved vaccine, it estimates that iBio could make about 500 million doses of high-quality product annually at its Texas facility. However, this depends on the potency that it sees in the clinic.

NIIMBL is a public-private partnership that aims to accelerate biopharmaceutical manufacturing innovations and establish an international, leading workforce to fundamentally strengthen the U.S. biopharmaceutical industry.

Tom Isett, co-chair and chief executive of iBio, commented:

That scalability links directly to the modular technology behind our FastPharming Manufacturing System, which uses a relative of the tobacco plant as the ‘bioreactor’ to produce biopharmaceuticals. So, the amount of product generated by a single plant is consistent from research- to commercial-scale, and scale-up is achieved by simply growing thousands more plants within our 130,000 square foot facility.  This is real innovation in the manufacture of biopharmaceuticals, thus our significant synergy with the NIIMBL community.

iBio stock traded up about 39% to $1.27 on Tuesday, in a 52-week range of $0.05 to $3.40. It has a market cap of roughly $130 million.

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