Lexington, KY-based Transposagen Biopharmaceuticals, Inc., has reached an agreement to expand its license for piggyBac technology to cover nearly all commercial applications. The IP, owned jointly by the University of Notre Dame, the University of Florida, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture, enables facile genetic manipulation of most species. Transposagen uses this core technology to create TKO Knockout Rat Models — lab rats with a single gene disruption that mimic human disease. The laboratory of Malcolm J. Fraser, Jr., professor in Notre Dame’s department of biological sciences, was responsible for the early characterization and development of the piggyBac DNA transposon. PiggyBac technology now is used for genetic engineering in almost any animal, allowing for both mutagenesis (changing or disrupting genes) and transgenesis (adding genes). PiggyBac enables genetic manipulation for many species, including research animals and agriculturally important animals for which genetic manipulation was previously impossible or cost-prohibitive.
“Transposagen was already using piggyBac to generate tens of thousands of knockout rat lines in a very short period of time,” says Eric Ostertag, the company’s CEO. “We will now be able to use piggyBac to modify the genomes of other important organisms. PiggyBac is also finding uses in human therapeutics as it can be used to reprogram cells to become induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells. In the long term, piggyBac may even be used for human gene therapy.” As part of the licensing deal, Transposagen will be responsible for distributing piggyBac to researchers and will control commercial sublicenses. “We will now be able to provide piggyBac to pharmaceutical companies as a novel tool for drug and biomarker discovery,” Ostertag says. The production of animal models is a $1.2 billion-a-year market and is expected to grow 12% annually through 2012.
Source: Reuters