Portland, Oregon
March 24, 2003LemnaGene LLC announced today that license
agreements have been concluded with Bayer CropScience and Yeda
Research and Development Company Ltd. to support its Lemnaceae
based recombinant protein production platform.
The Bayer license provides a full range of enabling
technologies for the production of biotherapeutics,
nutraceuticals, industrial enzymes and cosmeceuticals in
transgenic Lemnaceae (a plant also known as duckweed). The Yeda
agreement provides for an exclusive license of the results of a
long-term research program at the Weizmann Institute of Science
and a license to Lemnaceae know-how and technologies developed
by Weizmann scientists. It also includes an exclusive license on
pending patents on Lemnaceae transformation filed in several
countries and recently approved in Australia. LemnaGene is now
positioned to establish a dominant role in the industrial use of
Lemnaceae due to its intellectual property portfolio and the
industrial agreements that have been concluded so far. With
these in place, LemnaGene is moving forward with its first round
of financing and the establishment of its operations in Lyon
(France).
Professor Marvin Edelman of the Department of Plant Sciences
at the Weizmann Institute of Science commented, "Following over
twenty five years of research on Lemnaceae at the Weizmann
Institute by my group, and several years of joint research with
Bayer CropScience, we are very pleased that the commercial
development phase will be managed by LemnaGene. We believe that
now is the right time to launch such a business."
John W. Power, Chairman, LemnaGene LLC, commented, "LemnaGene
has now completed the formation of its basic technology platform
and is ready to move forward with the development of product
based applications for the pharmaceutical, vaccine,
nutraceutical and industrial markets. We are planning to
establish initial operations in Europe where the current
environment is highly supportive of such a business."
LemnaGene is a recently founded biomanufacturing company with
headquarters in Portland, Oregon. LemnaGene uses the rapidly
growing Lemnaceae (duckweed) water plant as its production
factory. In addition to its agreements with Yeda and Bayer
CropScience, LemnaGene also has agreements with RhoBio. The
exclusive agreement with RhoBio covers enabling technologies for
enhanced gene expression and thus improved protein production
and genes coding for anti- infectious peptides with
pharmaceutical applications.