In addition, the British company said it is expecting to see more licencing deals for the LentiVector gene delivery system in the future.
The unidentified licencee, which plans to conduct its own research on LentiVector, will pay Oxford BioMedica an upfront licence payment and an annual maintenance fee. Further financial details can not be disclosed, said Oxford BioMedica CEO Alan Kingsman in a telephone interview.
According to Kingsman, the unidentified company was already using the LentiVector technology at its labatory before the official agreement. By acquiring a license from Oxford BioMedica for the technology, the company could conduct its own research without committing infringement.
“They have now come to seek a license,” said Kingsman. “This technology is for their internal discovery programme. The actual area that they are working on is confidential. Nobody wants to tell their competitors what areas they are working in.” Kingsman said that such trial use of new technology among companies is a common practice before licensing.
Kingsman said the company expects to see “more deals of this type” in the longer term. He declined to elaborate.
Today’s announcement came after an agreement last week with Sigma-Aldrich, a U.S. based Nasdaq-listed life science company, to collaborate on the commercialisation of LentiVector. Sigma-Aldrich also agreed to pay $5 million for a less than two percent stake in Oxford BioMedica.
LentiVector is a technology that delivers genes to a wide range of cell and tissue types. It has applications both in therapeutic products and as a drug discovery tool for target validation and the creation of targeted disease models. Oxford BioMedica has about 70 staff. It has collaborations with Wyeth, Intervet, Viragen, MolMed and Kiadis, and has licensed technology to companies including Merck & Co, Biogen Idec and Pfizer.
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