Viventia Biotech, Dowpharma Enter License Agreement

Viventia Biotech, Inc. and Dowpharma contract manufacturing services, a business unit of The Dow Chemical Co., have entered into a commercial license agreement for Pfenex Expression Technology, a Pseudomonas-based technology from Dowpharma. Under the terms of the agreement, Viventia will employ Pfenex Expression Technology for as many as six therapeutic compounds, the first of which is an antibody-based product candidate in preclinical development. Pfenex Expression Technology accelerates speed to market for vaccines and biotherapeutics by improving quality, boosting yields of difficult-to-express proteins and reducing the cost of existing microbial systems. The agreement specifies milestone payments and commercial royalties on product sales; additional financial details were not disclosed.

“Our proprietary Armed Antibodies platform is a cutting edge approach yielding powerful yet precise antibody-based therapeutics for the treatment of a variety of cancers,” said Nick Glover, Ph.D., chief executive officer of Viventia Biotech. “To support the commercialization strategies for our drugs, it is essential that we be able to produce our Armed Antibodies efficiently and at commercially viable levels. Pfenex may enable us to increase the expression of our Armed Antibodies(TM) beyond the levels of other expression technologies and speed our process development.”

“We look forward to expanding the technology applicability of Pfenex by expressing antibody-based products, which are traditionally very difficult to express,” said Nick Hyde, global business director, Dowpharma. “This agreement further validates the biopharmaceutical industry’s need to more quickly and efficiently produce biotherapeutics.”