Lonza enters a commercial license agreement with Cytos
Gene Expression System with a new Expression Technology
Lonza Group Ltd and Cytos Biotechnology AG announce that they have entered into a collaboration in which Cytos gives Lonza access to its novel transient expression system for therapeutic proteins. Lonza has been granted a sole license to manufacture therapeutic proteins for preclinical studies, clinical trials and in-market supply, and the right to sublicense the technology to its customers. Cytos retains the rights to its expression technology for production and commercialisation. Under the terms of this agreement including the one-time payment of a technology access fee to Cytos, Lonza will be the only partner granted access to this unique expression system. In return Lonza will invest significant resources to develop a rapid and robust manufacturing process for GMP material. Following a successful development program carried out by Lonza, Cytos can earn a development milestone, annual license fees, and royalties on Lonza protein sales and technology sublicensing revenues.
John Birch, CSO of Lonza comments: "We believe that this new transient expression system from Cytos will complement Lonza's existing gene expression technology and help to substantially reduce customers' product development timelines. Many companies already use Lonza's glutamine synthetase (GS) gene expression system to create high yielding stable cell lines for large scale manufacturing. The Cytos system will additionally allow customers to access a very rapid transient system for producing quantities of product for early clinical development before production cell lines for long term use are available."
Mark Dyer, Executive Vice President of Business Development at Cytos comments: "Cytos' new mammalian expression system aims at a rapid solution for supply of GMP quality therapeutic proteins for clinical trials. Our goal is a time saving of several months through avoidance of the lengthy cloning steps needed to generate the stable transfected cell lines that are currently used in protein manufacturing. Cytos' innovation combined with Lonza's expertise in process development and manufacturing will yield a competitive, cost-effective system compatible with expression in standard manufacturing cell lines like CHO. Once successfully marketed, the Lonza - Cytos system will help our partner companies to rapidly start the clinical studies they need to gain proof-of-concept in humans and progress the monoclonal antibodies and other biopharmaceuticals in their R&D pipelines."
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