REDWOOD CITY, Calif. and SLOUGH, England, Jan. 8 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Celltech Group plc (London: CCH; NYSE: CLLand Maxygen, Inc. (Nasdaq: MAXY) today announced the signing of an agreement to undertake a technology collaboration, whereby Maxygen will potentially apply its MolecularBreeding™ directed evolution technology to four of Celltech's therapeutic monoclonal antibody programmes.
Under the terms of the agreement, Maxygen may receive license and option fees, full research and development funding, milestone payments, and royalties on product sales. Celltech retains exclusive worldwide rights to commercialize antibody therapeutics developed in the collaboration.
"Celltech is one of the pioneers in the antibody engineering field, and is now clearly established and positioned to commercialize important human therapeutics," said Jan Moller Mikkelsen, President of Maxygen's protein pharmaceutical division. "Celltech has the expertise, people and organization to take optimized antibodies developed in our collaboration through to the market."
Simba Gill, President of Maxygen added, "Our collaboration with Celltech is the fourth therapeutics corporate partnership we established in 2001. Maxygen's previous collaborations focus on using our proprietary technologies to improve cytokines, immunostimulatory factors and vaccines. By applying our capabilities to the field of antibodies, we are significantly expanding the therapeutic markets that Maxygen addresses with MolecularBreeding™ directed evolution technologies."
Dr Melanie Lee, Director of Research and Development at Celltech, commented: "Access to Maxygen's MolecularBreeding™ technology is important for Celltech as an additional part of our antibody technology portfolio. Used in combination with our other technologies it will enable us to produce high- quality therapeutic entities in all situations." ... |
