BioWorld International Correspondent

PARIS - Meristem Therapeutics signed a worldwide commercial license agreement with Japan Tobacco for the latter's proprietary monocot transformation system, PureIntro.

Meristem, which produces recombinant therapeutic proteins from transgenic plants, said PureIntro will enhance the efficiency of its plant engineering, or "molecular pharming," technology. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

PureIntro is designed to facilitate the process of transferring genes into plants such as corn, Meristem's marketing and communications manager, Emmanuel Boures, told BioWorld International. "It makes for cleaner, more efficient and better targeted insertion of the gene," he said.

He pointed out that Meristem already had a research license for the system, which had enabled it to establish the feasibility of applying it in its own production process. Now it had a nonexclusive license for unlimited commercial use of PureIntro, and the system would be incorporated in future manufacturing facilities developed by the company, Boures said.

Meristem, of Clermont-Ferrand, currently has a single extraction/purification plant that yields 20 kilos a year of pharmaceutical-grade recombinant proteins from plants (mainly corn and tobacco), but it is planning to develop industrial-scale production facilities with a capacity of 2 tons a year. It has the resources to do that thanks to the fourth funding round it completed at the end of June, which netted it -21.15 million and brought to -46 million the total funding the company has raised since its creation in 1998.

Its lead product is gastric lipase, which it is co-developing with the Belgian company Solvay Pharmaceuticals, of Brussels, for the treatment of cystic fibrosis. A large-scale Phase IIb trial of the product is due to start in 2003 following a successful Phase IIa trial completed earlier this year. Meristem has two other products under development: human lactoferrin, a protein secreted in mother's milk that protects against infections, which is undergoing a Phase IIa trial in an ophthalmologic indication; and human serum-albumin, a protein used in skin repair and reparative surgery.

Tokyo-based Japan Tobacco is not only a major manufacturer of tobacco products but also has diversified into pharmaceuticals and food processing since it was privatized in 1985.