ITI Life Sciences agrees first commercial licence

Licensing deal

ITI Life Sciences, the technology commercialisation company set up by the development agency Scottish Enterprise, reached its first commercial milestone with the grant of a licence to CXR Biosciences of Dundee, and Artemis Pharmaceuticals of Cologne, to use new technology generated in an R&D programme between the two companies that was funded by ITI.

The three-year £5.5 million programme started in February 2005 and aims to develop novel preclinical screening and toxicology models based on transgenic humanised mice. These mouse models, carrying human genes involved in drug metabolism, will be used to predict, earlier and more accurately, the effects that drug compounds and their metabolites will have in humans. This stage of the drug development process is an industry bottleneck, and the global market for metabolism and toxicity testing currently worth $3 billion a year.

The licensed models display certain key aspects of human drug metabolism and thus allow relevant and predictive studies on drug transport, metabolism and gene regulation to be carried out in vivo. Importantly, these models eliminate some of the species differences that result in variable drug effects between mice and humans.

The first mouse model has now been developed and ITI, which retains intellectual property rights to technology developed in its programmes has granted licences covering Europe and Japan to CXR and Artemis.  ITI Life Sciences will receive royalties on sales of the model, which will be re-invested in this and other programmes. Financial terms were not disclosed by the parties.

Eleanor Mitchell, ITI Life Sciences’ acting CEO, said, “Not only does this licence represent a significant achievement for ITI Life Sciences, but it also demonstrates the international appeal of the ITI approach. The close co-operation between CXR Biosciences, and Artemis resulted in the very rapid development of the new technology.”

“Over the next year we anticipate reaching a number of commercial milestones across the R&D programmes we have commissioned to date, as well as initiating new programmes based on our market foresighting.”

This first commercial licence is for a mouse that expresses the human PXR gene in place of the murine counterpart. Other lines are expected to be developed over the next two years.