Pharma giant GSK inked a licensing deal with Touchlight, giving the pharma giant non-exclusive access to the CDMO’s manufacturing tech dubbed "doggybone DNA."
Although financial details of the agreement weren’t disclosed, the deal includes an upfront payment to Touchlight, ongoing access fees, clinical and regulatory milestone payments, and other financial considerations such as royalties on mRNA products produced with the CDMO’s enzymatic dbDNA, the company said in a July 23 press release.
The doggybone DNA technology is a minimal, linear, covalently closed structure that eliminates bacterial sequences and accelerates speed and scale in manufacturing, according to Touchlight. It can be used to produce a variety of vaccines, therapeutics and gene therapies.
“The adoption of Touchlight’s enzymatic DNA is gathering pace and becoming an important part of the advanced therapy supply chain,” Jonny Ohlson, founder and executive chair of Torchlight, said in the release. “Our technology delivers the speed, scalability and high-quality DNA products that are essential for the next generation of mRNA therapeutics,”
Meanwhile, Touchlight also announced that it expects dbDNA will be used in an unnamed cancer vaccine and in several other investigational new drugs later this year.
The company’s production facility in Hampton, England, came online last year. It was first announced in 2021 and was financed with $125 million in venture funding. Other players that have inked deals with Torchlight include Pfizer, Lonza and Curia.