WuXi Expands Antibody Discovery Partnership with Transgenic Animal Developer
The second alliance with WuXi -the parent company of Chinese CRO WuXi AppTech -involves the first installation of transgenic rats, called OmniRat, in China, which will be followed with transgenic mice, called OmniMouse, later in the year, Brian Lundstrom, a spokesman for OMT, told Outsourcing-Pharma.com.
“This new model is particularly attractive for regional Asian companies with substantial home market businesses today, yet an aspiration to expand globally later,” Lundstrom said. “It is also attractive for OMT that we can get ex-regional product rights with preclinical, regulatory and possibly clinical data from the region in cases where the regional partners do not exercise their option for global rights.”
The terms of the deal were not disclosed but Lundstrom said “global deals have industry standard fees while the regional deals are 10-15% of that.”
Under the new agreement, regional Asian companies now can access OMT’s technologies as an integrated part of WuXi’s services in China, Korea, Japan, and other countries for a one-time upfront fee or a smaller annual fee, with an option to assume global rights up to the first human dose for additional fees, Lundstrom said.
He added that OMT will pay WuXi’s regional partners the same royalty percentage on OMT’s, or its other partners’ net sales outside the region.
“The deal structure enables OMT to tap into the economics of rapidly growing Asian companies and, when global rights are not exercised by WuXi’s clients, to leverage their data for OMT product development and/or partnering outside Asia,” Dr. Roland Buelow, founder and CEO of OMT, said.
The partnership builds on a previous deal related to the rat platform for generating fully-human antibodies directly.
