ProteoNic and Oxford Expression Technologies Sign UNic™ License for Use in flashBAC™ Protein Expression Platform

Dutch biotech company ProteoNic BV and Oxford Expression Technologies Ltd (OET) have extended their partnership by signing a commercial license agreement.

Leiden, Netherlands/Oxford, United Kingdom, March 7, 2013 / B3C newswire / – Dutch biotech company ProteoNic BV and Oxford Expression Technologies Ltd (OET), a leading provider of baculovirus-based protein expression products and services, have extended their partnership by signing a commercial license agreement. OET obtains the right to use ProteoNic’s UNic™ translation enhancing elements in its flashBAC™ system for third party recombinant protein production services. ProteoNic will provide technical support. Financial terms include upfront and royalty payments.
Both companies will be represented at BIO Europe Spring in Barcelona on March 11 -13 and are available for partnering meetings.

Under a previous collaboration, the two companies have successfully combined ProteoNic’s award-winning UNic™ translation enhancing technology with OET’s flashBAC™ system to significantly enhance recombinant protein yields in insect cells. Application of UNic™ not only allows increased overall efficiency and reduction of costs, but also facilitates (pre)clinical development of biopharmaceutical products that otherwise might be discarded due to difficulties in achieving acceptable production levels. This allows biopharmaceutical companies to broaden their pipeline and increase its value while reducing the drug development risk profile. From now on OET’s contract manufacturing services will include UNic™
technology.

Rory Woodhouse, Sales Manager at OET commented: “The combination of the unique UNic™ technology and the flashBAC™ expression system has already proved itself to have a positive effect on eukaryotic protein expression. This new agreement will enable us to build on our partnership and experience with ProteoNic, working together to provide a superior platform for our customers with more challenging to express proteins.”

Victor Schut, Chief Business Officer at ProteoNic added: “We are pleased to have demonstrated the value of partnership in combining two proven technologies. This will allow our customers to benefit from both our expertise through only one service. The successful application of our technology in the flashBAC system adds another recombinant protein production platform to our portfolio enabling us to serve a new market for ProteoNic.”