Medicago has developed and is now using the VLPExpress, a high-throughput platform that accelerates the Company’s discovery and development of new vaccines by rapidly expressing, purifying and testing candidate VLPs. The VLPExpress platform identifies the best VLP-based antigen presentations for a disease-causing agent within 10 weeks. Each antigen or antigen variants are rapidly screened for their potential to provide protection. The Company uses a scaled-down transient technology which offers a rapid and low-cost production system with the capacity to accelerate development of new vaccines. In addition, the use of VLPs for antigen surface display allows for the full exploitation of the immunogenic potential of the best antigens. The combination of these technologies in the VLPExpress platform allows researchers to express numerous target proteins of a pathogen to build a library of all possible VLPs in a short timeframe. The best targets are then characterized, produced and purified.