Dec. 11 /PRNewswire/ -- Viragen, Inc. (Amex: VRA - news) and The Roslin Institute, the renowned Scottish birthplace of the world's most famous sheep, Dolly, will host a reception at the British Consulate-General in New York City this afternoon from 5:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. Viragen and Roslin announced their collaboration at a news conference from Edinburgh Castle, Scotland, last week. The project is designed to enable biotech and pharmaceutical companies to produce drugs, including monoclonal antibodies to fight cancer, inside the eggs of specially developed chickens.
The agreement between Viragen and Roslin provides Viragen an exclusive, worldwide license to commercialize Roslin's avian transgenic technology for the production of therapeutic and diagnostic proteins in chicken eggs.
Dr. Helen Sang, Roslin Institute's lead scientist on avian (bird) transgenic technology will be honored at the reception and will share with the press and analysts key aspects of the collaboration.
Roslin has already successfully developed transgenic chickens.
The initial efforts will target the production of Viragen's portfolio of anti-cancer drugs using Roslin Institute's existing direct injection expertise. In the longer term Roslin Institute and Viragen intend to develop nuclear transfer as a more efficient means of creating transgenic birds. As noted by Dr. Sang, ``the cloning of Dolly was a dramatic scientific breakthrough that served to open the way to new commercial therapeutic applications. The essence of this project is to create chickens which produce eggs containing new drugs to treat many serious diseases, including cancer. While animals such as cows, sheep, goats and rabbits are being developed to produce drugs in their milk, avian technology promises a much faster, cheaper and virtually unlimited production process marked by the chicken's prolific egg laying capabilities.''
The Roslin Institute is the acknowledged world leader in the research and development of mammalian cloning. Dr. Helen Sang produced the first ever transgenic chicken by direct injection and is a world recognized expert in her field.
For Viragen, this project represents the culmination of a series of collaborative projects with major institutions including Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, New York, for the development of a human monoclonal antibody for melanoma and other cancers, the U.K.'s Cancer Research Campaign to develop a cancer vaccine for the treatment of breast, ovarian and colorectal cancers and the U.S. Government's National Institutes of Health (``NIH'') which licensed Viragen exclusively and globally for its ``Notch 1'' technology. In addition to its oncological project, Viragen's lead product, Omniferon(TM), a leukocyte derived alpha interferon, is in Phase II clinical trials in Europe targeting hepatitis C, a disease estimated to affect tens of million worldwide. Other notable Viragen agreements include those with the Common Services Agencies of the United Kingdom, preferential access to white blood cells collected by the German Red Cross and America's Blood Centers and an agreement with The American Red Cross.... |
