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20 September 2018Americas

ERS extends CRISPR influence with two licensing deals

ERS Genomics and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard signed CRISPR licensing deals with Thermo Fisher Scientific on Tuesday, shortly before ERS expanded a separate agreement with Oxford Genetics.

In the Thermo Fisher deals, the Broad Institute and ERS—which was formed to provide access to the foundational CRISPR/Cas9 IP held by French researcher Emmanuelle Charpentier—granted Thermo Fisher global non-exclusive rights to products, tools and services for research.

Thermo Fisher, a US biotechnology product development company, said it now holds one of the “most complete” CRISPR IP portfolios, having signed a deal in 2015 to license CRISPR IP owned by Korean biotech company ToolGen.

The US company’s CRISPR product line includes Invitrogen TrueCut Cas9 Protein v2.0, Invitrogen TrueGuide Synthetic gRNAs, and Invitrogen LentiArray CRISPR Libraries.

Thermo Fisher added that because its CRISPR portfolio complements its exclusive rights to Tal Effector Nuclease (TALEN) technology, which is also used for gene-editing, the company can provide a wide selection of products and services for customers’ research programmes.

“The combination of CRISPR and TALEN technologies provides a complete genome-editing toolbox that moves researchers closer to the promise of delivering on the potential of synthetic biology,” said Jon Chesnut, Thermo Fisher’s senior director of research and development for synthetic biology.

In the second agreement, announced today, September 20, ERS expanded a licensing deal with Oxford Genetics, a UK-based synthetic biology company. The deal was originally signed in 2017.

The non-exclusive agreement previously allowed Oxford Genetics to supply CRISPR-modified cell lines to the US and Europe, but it has now been extended to include the Asia Pacific (APAC) region. It comes as demand for the service has quadrupled in 2018, according to the statement.

Paul Brooks, chief commercial officer at Oxford Genetics, said: “The market for CRISPR tools, reagents and services in the APAC region is forecast to grow in double digits for the next several years as product adoption accelerates while companies explore the full potential of the technology.”

The agreements come ten days after the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruled in favour of the Broad Institute, confirming that its patent claims to CRISPR/Cas9 do not interfere with those held by the University of California (UC). Charpentier and the University of Vienna joined UC as appellants in the case.

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More on this story

Europe
1 November 2018   The company that provides access to CRISPR/Cas9 IP owned by researcher Emmanuelle Charpentier, ERS Genomics, has signed a patent licensing deal with DefiniGEN, a spin-out from the University of Cambridge, UK.
Biotechnology
16 October 2018   ERS Genomics, the company providing access to CRISPR/Cas9 IP owned by Emmanuelle Charpentier, has signed a licensing deal with synthetic biology startup Syngulon.
Americas
19 October 2018   Amgen has invested £50 million ($66 million) in Oxford Nanopore Technologies, a UK company specialising in DNA/RNA sequencing technology.

More on this story

Europe
1 November 2018   The company that provides access to CRISPR/Cas9 IP owned by researcher Emmanuelle Charpentier, ERS Genomics, has signed a patent licensing deal with DefiniGEN, a spin-out from the University of Cambridge, UK.
Biotechnology
16 October 2018   ERS Genomics, the company providing access to CRISPR/Cas9 IP owned by Emmanuelle Charpentier, has signed a licensing deal with synthetic biology startup Syngulon.
Americas
19 October 2018   Amgen has invested £50 million ($66 million) in Oxford Nanopore Technologies, a UK company specialising in DNA/RNA sequencing technology.