Paris, France
February 25, 2004
Cellectis SA, a
biotechnology company
specialized in genome engineering, announced today that the
company was expanding its current agreement with
BASF Plant Science
GmbH.
The
agreement, covering the evaluation and use of Cellectis’
proprietary Meganuclease I-SceI for the deletion/excision
of nucleotide sequences, such as marker genes, in plants for
agricultural and nutritional applications has been extended to
further crops of interest for BASF Plant Science GmbH.
Financial terms and conditions of the agreement were not
disclosed.
"We are
extremely pleased with this opportunity to expand the scope of
our agreement with BASF Plant Science, which was previously
announced in May 2003” says Mrs. Pelletier-Bressac, VP Business
Development of Cellectis.
“The
combination of BASF Plant Science’s expertise in the field of
plant biotechnology with Cellectis’ expertise in the
Meganuclease field represents a very advantageous partnership,"
she added. “The fact that the evaluation has so far been
positive is very satisfying and demonstrates the potential
industrial value of our technology as a new marker excision
technology in plants”.
BASF is the
world’s leading chemical company. In 2002, BASF had sales of
about €32 billion and over 89,000 employees worldwide. All BASF
activities involving plant biotechnology are incorporated in
BASF Plant Science. BASF Plant Science coordinates an
international research and technology platform with seven sites
in four countries in Europe and North America and employs about
400 people.
Cellectis SA was founded in 1999, as a spin-off from the
Institut Pasteur. It is the first company to apply the
Meganuclease Recombination System approach to in vivo genome
engineering. The company is developing Meganucleases that can
target a unique DNA break in vivo, as a fundamentally enabling
technology for commercial applications in human therapeutics,
pharmaceutical discovery, agriculture, and industrial
biotechnology. Cellectis has already entered into 20 deals for
the use of its genome engineering technologies, covering a wide
range of applications such as animal models, protein production
or agricultural crops improvement. |