CDMO giant Lonza inked a deal with Touchlight to expand production and distribution of the biotech’s so-called doggybone DNA platform.
As part of the collaboration, Lonza gets access to Touchlight’s technology, which is a minimal, lineal, covalently closed structure that eliminates bacterial sequences and should accelerate speed and scale in manufacturing, the company said. In return, Touchlight will be able to expand the channels customers can use to access its doggybone DNA (dbDNA) platform.
Financial terms of the agreement weren’t disclosed.
“We can now provide our customers with a strong foundation to deliver an end-to-end offering that includes access to a novel synthetic DNA technology,” André Goerke, Lonza’s vice president of the mRNA business unit, said in a press release. “Such an integrated solution can prove beneficial in speeding up time to market, which is critical in the fast-paced industry of mRNA manufacturing.”
Touchlight signed a nonexclusive license agreement in July with Pfizer as part of the pharma giant’s exploration of next-gen dbDNA technology for manufacturing a variety of vaccines, therapeutics and gene therapies.
It was just a year ago that Touchlight hauled in $125 in venture funding it used to expand the scale of its Hampton, U.K., facility, allowing it to produce up to 1 kilogram of DNA per month.