Recent Tech Transfer Deals (12/2003)
This article was originally published in Start Up
Executive Summary
Summarizing the month in tech transfer deals between Academia and Industry.
Pharmaceuticals
Amersham PLC
Amersham Health
(Buckinghamshire, UK) — www.amersham.co.uk — (44) 1494 544000
University of Pittsburgh
(Pittsburgh, PA) — www.pitt.edu/research.html — 412-648-2206
Amersham licenses PET agents from the Univ. of Pittsburgh
Nov.—Amersham Health (diagnostic imaging and therapeutics) has licensed from the University of Pittsburgh a class of molecules that target amyloid plaque in the brain.
Amersham hopes to identify a lead compound that it will evaluate in the clinic as a PET (positron emission tomography) diagnostic and monitoring agent for Alzheimer's disease. Additional licensed molecules will be assessed as potential Alzheimer's therapeutics by Amersham's global network of imaging research centers called Imanet. Through an established partnership with the university, Amersham has performed preclinical and clinical studies on the molecules and found evidence supporting their safety. The compounds directly bind to amyloid plaque--an important factor in monitoring the progression of Alzheimer's disease--and may have potential in stopping or reversing deposits of amyloid plaque in the brain. PET offers a method for early diagnosis and for accurately monitoring disease and assessing a patient's response to treatment.
ARC Pharmaceuticals Inc.
(Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada) — www.arcpharma.com — 604-222-9577
University of British Columbia
(Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada) — www.ubc.ca — 604-822-0233
ARC gets anti-inflammatories from the Univ. of BC
Nov.—ARC Pharmaceuticals (developing therapeutics for inflammatory diseases) licensed exclusive worldwide rights to a class of anti-inflammatory compounds from the University of British Columbia.
ARC receives intellectual property for use in its own anti-inflammatory program. It pays UBC milestones and royalties and gives the university additional equity in the company. ARC will focus on developing new therapies for surgical adhesion disease, which occurs when tissues that are normally separated grow together after surgery. The disease is often treated with films, gels, and sprays that are applied during surgery to prevent adhesions from forming between organs. Such procedures have limited effectiveness because organs still become inflamed. ARC plans to combine the licensed compounds into polymeric barriers to prevent the disease pharmacologically and physically. The company says the candidates may also have use in treating various other inflammatory diseases, such as arthritis. ARC signed a similar deal with UBC in October 2002.
Auxin SA
(Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium)
BTG
(London, UK) — www.btgplc.com — (44) 20 7575 0000
UCB Group
UCB SA
(Brussels, Belgium) — www.ucb-group.com — (32) 2559 9999
University of Parma
(Parma, Italy) — www.unipr.it — (39) 521 032111
BTG licenses MESNA from Auxin, UCB, ARDO
Oct.—BTG licensed exclusive patent, development, and commercialization rights to MESNA (sodium-2-mercaptoethane sulfonate), a synthetic sulfhydryl compound, for use in chemically assisted dissection. The licensers were Auxin SA (founded to sell technologies from the University of Louvain), UCB SA, and ARDO (Associazione Ricerca e Didattica in Otologia)--an ENT physician practice operating within the University of Parma.
Scientists have found that MESNA has the capacity to break molecular bonds in tissues. Auxin originally licensed rights from the compound's inventors at ARDO and signed a supply and know-how agreement with UCB. Auxin found it was unable to fulfill the commercialization of MESNA for the surgical indication (MESNA also has indications as a mucolytic agent and for the prevention of hemorrhagic cystitis associated with the chemotherapeutic ifosfamide) and chose BTG, which specializes in finding, developing, and selling emerging technologies in the life and physical sciences. BTG now gets the UCB supply and know-how license and the deal includes an agreement between BTG and ARDO to perform additional research.
GeneMax Corp.
(Blaine, WA) — www.genemax.com — 360-332-7734
National Institutes of Health
National Inst. of Allergy & Infectious Diseases
(Bethesda, MD) — ott.od.nih.gov — 301-496-7057
GeneMax licenses NIAID technology to develop smallpox vaccine
Nov.—Immunotherapeutics company GeneMax has licensed nonexclusive worldwide rights from the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases for use of the modified vaccinia Ankara (MVA).
GeneMax intends to use the nonreplicating pox virus vector in its development of a vaccine against smallpox. MVA can simultaneously express several foreign antigens and evoke immune responses against them. MVA-based viruses have demonstrated their efficacy in clinical trials for use in recombinant human vaccines against several infectious and neoplastic diseases--even in immunocompromised individuals. GeneMax says the technology complements its TAP (Transporters Associated with Antigen Processing) immunotherapies against cancer. TAP is a protein necessary to the production of tumor antigens that trigger the immune system to find and kill cancer cells. In several major cancers, this TAP cell pathway is blocked or turned off; GenMax is developing a vaccine that can restore this protein in patients with breast, prostate, lung, liver, or colorectal cancers, or those with melanoma.
Large Scale Biology Corp.
(Vacaville, CA) — www.lsbc.com — 707-446-5501
Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center
(Cincinnati, OH) — www.cincinnatichildrens.org — 513-636-4200
LSB licenses plaque compound from Cincinnati Children's
Nov.—Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center has granted Large Scale Biology Corp. (genomics technology and protein production) exclusive rights to develop a potential treatment for atherosclerosis and cholesterol storage disorders.
The license is based on the use of lysomal acid lipase (LAL), which has been shown to reduce plaque accumulation in mice that have been fed high-fat diets long term. The LAL eliminated early-stage accumulation of coronary and aortic plaque and was beneficial to both the quantity and the quality of plaque in more advanced stages. The research has been led by Gregory A. Grabowski, MD, director of the hospital's division of human genetics. LSBC says it will use its biomanufacturing technologies to produce LAL for clinical applications and plans to find a commercial partner for co-development of the treatment.
Locus Pharmaceuticals Inc.
(Blue Bell, PA) — www.locusdiscovery.com — 215-358-2000
Cornell University
Cornell Research Foundation Inc.
(Ithaca, NY) — www.cornell.edu — 607-255-7200
Weill Medical College
(New York, NY) — www.med.cornell.edu —212-746-6186
Locus will use Cornell technology in HIV drug research
Oct.—Locus Pharmaceuticals (computational technology for drug discovery) has licensed from Cornell Research Foundation a crystal structure of a helical domain of gp41, a protein on which HIV fusion and viral infectivity are dependent.
Min Lu, PhD, associate professor of biochemistry at Cornell's Weill Medical College, identified this new domain and determined its crystal structure. Locus will apply its fragment-based computational technology to the structure to identify small molecules that block the protein. Its technology can simultaneously find relevant binding sites on disease targets and generate drug-like molecules to bind specifically to them. The company has previously succeeded in de novo design of compounds that inactivate different regions of gp41, and these have demonstrated antiviral activity in experiments at the NIH and other research centers. The Cornell crystal structure supplies 3-dimensional protein information about a previously unsolved gp41 region.
Pintex Pharmaceuticals Inc.
(Watertown, MA) — www.pintexpharm.com —617-924-9200
Max Planck Society
Garching Innovation GMBH
(Munich, Germany) — www.mpg.de — (49) 892 1080
Research Unit for Enzymology of Protein Folding
(Halle/Saale, Germany) — www.enzyme-halle.mpg.de — (49) 345 552 2801
Pintex Pharmaceuticals licenses technology from Max Planck
Nov.—Through its technology transfer arm Garching Innovation GMBH, the Max Planck Society's Research Unit for Enzymology of Protein Folding licensed Pintex Pharmaceuticals (develops structure-based cancer therapeutics) exclusive worldwide rights to develop and commercialize its technology.
Pintex plans to use the licensed technology to develop therapies and diagnostics targeting the Pin1 enzyme, which is overexpressed in many human cancer tissues including breast and prostate, and may be the most extensive tumor marker identified thus far. Inhibition of Pin1 causes tumor cells to either enter apoptosis or convert to non-transformed phenotypes. Pintex says it will soon begin preclinical studies on a small-molecule Pin1 inhibitor. Evidence suggests that the enzyme may also play a role in the prevention of Alzheimer's disease. The company received exclusive rights to Pin1 technology from Harvard Medical School and the Salk Institute. Its intellectual property portfolio contains over 75 patents and patent applications worldwide that are based on the Pin1 enzyme.