Isogenica announces new partnership with UK Ministry of Defence agency

Feb. 15, 2010 - PRLog -- Isogenica Ltd today announced that it has entered into an agreement with UK Ministry of Defence agency, the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (Dstl).  The agreement concerns the development of antimicrobial peptide drugs and follows a successful collaboration to identify highly effective antimicrobial peptides which are active against a broad spectrum of bacteria.  

Under the agreement Dstl has assigned all patent rights and know-how associated with the antimicrobial peptides for commercial use to Isogenica (http://www.isogenica.com).  Isogenica will exclusively market and distribute the products globally, paying royalty fees on sales to Dstl (http://www.dstl.gov.uk).  Potential application areas include the treatment of drug resistant bacteria, such as MRSA and C Difficile, which have proven to be a major problem in hospital acquired infections.

Kevin Matthews, CEO of Isogenica commented: “We have very much enjoyed working with Dstl and are delighted that they have the confidence in Isogenica to take the next step and commercialise the technology.  As a company we are focused on servicing the protein engineering needs of the pharmaceutical and biotech industries and as a result of such partnerships we are discovering highly active lead candidates for drug development.  Our focus now is to identify channels to market for these new and potent therapeutic peptides”.

Dstl joins an increasing number of leading pharmaceutical and biotech companies that have already partnered with Isogenica in the discovery of novel peptides for therapeutic and non-therapeutic applications or licenses. These include Amgen, AstraZeneca, Centocor, GE Healthcare, Invitrogen, Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, Phylogica, Smiths Detection Systems, UCB and Wyeth.

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About Isogenica: Isogenica specialises in providing protein engineering services using its core technology, “CIS display”, to pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies for the discovery, identification and design of new peptide, polypeptide and antibody lead compounds. CIS display can construct within a few hours polypeptide libraries of unprecedented size and complexity in vitro, without the need for cloning. These can be processed to identify better products and motifs in just a few days. Active peptides with antibody-like levels of affinity and specificity for target compounds can be isolated and then rapidly matured to optimise desirable qualities. CIS display technology has particular benefits against biological membrane preparations, cells and bacteria. The technology is adaptable for the display of different proteins and has been licensed for the Centyrin scaffold. http://www.isogenica.com